Electronic Book Review - janet murrayhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/janet-murray
enInteractive Fictionhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/fictive
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<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Nick Montfort</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-04-17</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Asking whether a new media artifact is a story or a game is like asking of a poem: Which is it? Narrative or metrical? This contrived question holds two dangers. Most obviously, it suggests that narrative and meter are somehow opposing forces in poetry, indeed, that they are exclusive. The further danger is its implicit presupposition, that these are the only two interesting aspects of a poem. We almost certainly would benefit from considering whether the poem is book-length or short, if it is schematically alliterative, what themes it treats, if it is in a traditional or invented form, and what traditions it works in or against, but the first dichotomy, by distracting with its false opposition, disguises the other important aspects of the poem because it silently claims that there are only two important aspects.</p>
<p>Advocates of game studies and ludology have rallied against the simplistic consideration of computer games as stories, resisting what they refer as the “colonization” of the new field by literary studies as they build up their rebel fleet on the ice planet. Of course their project is not to banish discussion of story from computer game studies (how could it be, when half the articles in the premiere issue of the journal <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> take the issue of narrative as their central topic?) but to ensure that discussion is framed in terms of a new discipline, native to the computer game. Discourse about new media, at its best, no longer concerns itself with the mythical story/game dichotomy. Instead critics like Henry Jenkins are considering in detail the many ways that story is involved with, produced by, or reflected in games, and pointing out that aspects such as the simulated environment are often more important than the “story,” even when we have determined what exactly that is (Game-Stories 2001). Janet Murray describes other, overlapping categories: “puzzle” and “contest,” creating a Venn diagram with four circles instead of just the usual “story” and “game” categories (Game-Stories 2001). Even in this view, however, the Venn diagram that Murray offers collapses apples and oranges into the same plane. Story, game, and puzzle are better viewed as aspects of new media vectors in an n-dimensional space, some of which are orthogonal and some of which are not rather than categories, even intersecting categories. Even this concept is lacking in some ways. What is important to realize is that while there are such things as “games” and “stories,” many new media artifacts are neither of these, but employ elements from both. They employ elements from other forms and can be understood using other figures, too. What is important to distinguish about these different aspects and elements is which of them are essential to which well-defined categories of new media artifacts, and how they are or are not tied to one another.</p>
<p>Making broad claims about “new media” or even “computer games” can be problematic. There are new media forms that are reasonable categories: the massively muliplayer role-playing game, the first-person shooter, the hypertext novel, the chatterbot. Whatever the difficulties with definitions, we know a first-person shooter, like obscenity, when we see it. I focus here on one new media form, recognized by authors and interactors to be its own category: interactive fiction. Examples of interactive fiction, abbreviated as IF, include <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span> and <span class="booktitle">Zork</span>; later literary efforts <span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>, <span class="booktitle">Trinity</span>, <span class="booktitle">Amnesia</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span>; and more recent works such as <span class="booktitle">Curses</span> and <span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>. Rather than begin with a definition of IF, I’ll go through a series of figures that can be used to understand the form beginning with story and game, but not stopping there and conclude by considering which of these figures are defining and which are important to the poetics of interactive fiction.</p>
<h2>Story</h2>
<p>Even IF that clearly has puzzle-solving as its only pleasure works that make fortune cookies seem florid produce narratives as a result of sessions of interaction. Here is a concrete example of how IF is potential narrative, a space of possibility in which the user’s inputs, parsed as actions, become part of a narrative text:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Orange River Chamber</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You are in a splendid chamber thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward canyon and a good passage exit from east and west sides of the chamber.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">&gt;TAKE BIRD</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You catch the bird in the wicker cage.</p>
<p>This text is a minimal story, by Gerald Prince’s (1973) definition, produced in a session of interaction with <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. The initial state has an adventurer in a cave chamber with a little bird. The adventurer types “TAKE BIRD” to take the bird. Then, as a result, the bird is in the wicker cage.</p>
<h2>Game</h2>
<p>Jesper Juul, after demonstrating that the case for story in computer games is overstated, adds that “many computer games contain narrative elements” (Juul 2001). Reversing this formulation works better for IF. It is a potential narrative that may contain game elements. Some interactive fiction works cannot be “won” and do not keep score: Emily Short’s <span class="booktitle">Galatea</span> and Ian Finley’s <span class="booktitle">Exhibition</span> are examples. They are not games by the definition Eric Zimmerman gives, <cite id="note_1">Games have an explicit rule system, according to Zimmerman, and they have a definite result or outcome. This definition was described by him in the “Aesthetics of Game Design” panel at Computers and Video Games Come of Age, and in the “Game-Stories: Simulation, Narrative, Addiction” panel at SIGGRAPH 2001. This distinguishes games and more general play activity very well, which is what the definition evidently was created to do, but it does not distinguish between games and puzzles as well as I would like, or indeed at all.</cite> and only by liberally extending the concept of “symbolic reward” would they be games by Espen Aarseth’s definition. <cite id="note_2">Games provide “symbolic rewards,” in Aarseth’s formulation, which may be in the form of higher scores or in some other form. This would possibly allow for a Furby or Tamagotchi to be a game, because growth and good behavior of these creatures might be a reward, but it would rule out slot machines and vending machines, which dispense real, rather than symbolic, rewards. This was described by Aarseth in a talk to a Comparative Media Studies seminar at MIT in February 2001.</cite> I prefer to define game as a contest (one of the categories Murray distinguished) but a contest broadly defined, either played directly against one or more players or played individually in an attempt to break a record or achieve a superior score. Game elements are used in interactive fiction to convey the extent of a work (a score of 20 out of 250 replaces being on page 20 of 250) and to provide what hypertext theorists and pop psychologists call “closure,” but they are seldom used to actually structure a contest. Hence the popular way of referring to IF works, as “games,” highlights an aspect of IF that is not fundamental, and suggests a figure that is not one of the more useful ones for understanding the form.</p>
<h2>Storygame</h2>
<p>Mary Ann Buckles, author of the first dissertation on interactive fiction, suggests a different concept, that of the “storygame,” for understanding the form. Although Buckles writes that “in <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>, the game is embedded in a story” (Buckles 1985, 32), her term suggests that rather than one element being embedded in the other, both are essential to the experience and are intertwined rather than nested. <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span> is a precomputer case of an experience that inextricably merges story and game and performance as well. <cite id="note_3">I have not mentioned performance until now because the term seems to have little direct relevance to interactive fiction and has not dominated the discourse around computer games the way that “story” and “game” have. However, the performing arts are rich in figures that may help in understanding interactive fiction too rich to treat well in a short essay like this. See particularly Laurel 1986, 74ñ81, which treats <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> in dramatic terms; <span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span> author Robert Pinsky also emphasized the applicability of the dramatic perspective to IF poetics in his MIT Media Lab Colloquium in February 1997.</cite> One cannot simply remove the story from <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span> the way that the narrative cut-scenes in <span class="booktitle">Ms. Pac-Man</span> can be lifted away. Nor can the aspects of contest be removed without changing the experience into something other than <span class="booktitle">Dungeons and Dragons</span>. IF works can, similarly, involve story and game essentially but neither quality is part of IF’s foundation. The “story” that occurs emerges through interaction, and what is commonly thought of as “game” in the form is when it is present better understood through other figures.</p>
<h2>Novel</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span> and other Synapse titles were labeled “electronic novels.” Some IF works (including those) typically take many hours of interaction to complete. Other works, such as those entered in the annual IF competition <a class="outbound" href="http://ifcomp.org/">http://ifcomp.org/</a>, are designed to be completed within two hours. Seeing those in the former category as “novels” and the latter sort as “short stories” is a sensible way to describe how much interaction time is required. It is not particularly the case, however, that aesthetic or poetic principles of the novel vis-ý-vis the short story apply to these two sorts of works. It is not in fact obvious that IF is more closely tied to traditions of written prose than to other literary traditions.</p>
<h2>World</h2>
<p>IF accepts natural-language text from the interactor and produces text in reply, but the same can be said for the stand-alone chatterbot <span class="booktitle">Racter</span> or a database that takes English-like queries. What distinguishes IF from these systems is that in addition to a “parser” there is another essential element of an IF work: a “world model.” Aristotle held that a play could exist even without characters, but never without a plot (Aristotle 1961). In IF, it is the world (like the literary “setting”) that is essential characters and plot can be dispensed with, but a system is not IF unless it simulates a world, however erratically and in however limited a way.</p>
<h2>Literature</h2>
<p>Accepting the ideas of Russian Formalism, and specifically Victor Shklovsky’s (1965) concept that the literary nature of a text comes from its “making strange” ordinary reality, it’s evident that not just the textual output of IF but even the nature of many IF puzzles hinge on their literariness (Randall 1988). Although variation between the <span class="foreignWord">sjuzet</span> and the <span class="foreignWord">fabula</span> is not the main device used to accomplish this (it is employed at times for instance, in Adam Cadre’s <span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>) IF does use the technique of literary art “to make objects unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 1965).</p>
<h2>Puzzle</h2>
<p>A puzzle is a formal test of ingenuity. A jigsaw puzzle is, of course, a puzzle, as is a scrambled Rubik’s Cube or a verbally posed logic problem or lateral thinking puzzle. The device of the puzzle is described as essential to IF by Graham Nelson, creator of the IF development system Inform and author of <span class="booktitle">Curses</span>: “Without puzzles, or problems, or mechanisms to allow the player to receive the text a little at a time… there is no interaction” (Nelson, 2001, 382). But IF has been devised without puzzles; conversation and exploration rather than puzzle-solving allow one to move further through these works while interacting. Undoubtedly, the puzzle provides the main effective way to engage the interactor deeply. Dealing with explicit puzzles, however, involves a mode of thought alien to ordinary reading; progress through the text of a novel is not arrested when the reader comes up with the wrong answer. As important as the puzzle has been, finding a way in which the puzzle-solving and reading aspects of IF work together instead of in opposition is also important.</p>
<h2>Problem</h2>
<p>The single academic article about <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> by its creators does not use the word “puzzle.” The challenges in <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> are instead referred to by Lebling, Blank, and Anderson (1979) as “problems.” Problems are questions raised for solution; the term suggests that they are more likely to be posed as homework than for diversion, but this is a matter of connotation. Essentially puzzles and problems are the same. But if all puzzles or problems are games, we are in left in the difficult situation in which “2 + 2 = ?” is a game. That question is a puzzle, however uninteresting it may seem, <cite id="note_4">“2 + 2 = ?” may actually be a slightly interesting puzzle. On a planet in which the inhabitants have two fingers on each of their two hands, the answer is likely to be “10,” since such creatures would probably use base 4 arithmetic.</cite> but it rightly seems difficult to swallow as a game. It is more sensible to define games as contests and also allow the existence of puzzles and problems that are not games. Defined this way, a crossword puzzle is a puzzle, not a game; “Let’s see who can finish the crossword puzzle first” is a game. Similarly, chess is a game; the knight’s tour is a puzzle that uses the gaming equipment and rules for movement from the game of chess.</p>
<p>Whether called puzzles or problems, challenges do play an important role in almost all IF. However, the concept of “problem” helps no more than does “puzzle” in connecting these challenges to the narrative world presented in IF. It is this connection, and the establishment of systems that have meaning outside of their own closed workings, that is the excellence of the IF form.</p>
<h2>Riddle</h2>
<p>The connection of a puzzle or problem to issues in the world (not only the world of the IF work but the world that we inhabit) of the sort that literature engages is best seen in the figure <span class="lightEmphasis">riddle</span>. The riddle, as discussed here, is a didactic form of poetry, not a response-format light-bulb joke. A famous riddle that was said to confound Homer is: “Those we have caught we left behind, those that have eluded us we carry with us.” <cite id="note_5">The answer gives the title to W. S. Merwin’s third book of poetry, <span class="booktitle">The Lice</span>. I am indebted to Will Hochman for pointing out how this riddle is an excellent figure for how the most puzzling aspects of literature are those that stay with us.</cite> There are many examples from Greek and Latin that remain current in our culture; the English tradition of the riddle begins, in writing, at the very beginning of written English literature, with the Anglo-Saxon riddles of the Exeter Book.</p>
<p>Many works of IF simply contain riddles which must be solved in order to progress, but it is more useful to consider not the explicit presence of riddles in IF but the riddle as a figure for how IF works. The best examples of IF do what the best riddles do: they create a provocative system of thought that one is invited to enter, explore, and understand demonstrating one’s understanding, at last, by explicitly offering a solution.</p>
<p>A puzzle in the mainframe <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> (which appears in the commercial <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> I) <cite id="note_6"><span class="booktitle">Zork</span> was modified, split into three works which contain some new material, and published as <span class="booktitle">Zork IñIII</span>. This trilogy was sold for a wide variety of personal computers by Infocom, a company founded by the <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> creators and fellow students and researchers from MIT. <span class="booktitle">Zork IñIII</span> have been made available for free download by Activision, which acquired Infocom in 1986: <a class="outbound" href="http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html">http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html</a>.</cite> provides a example that is not spectacular but is concise enough to relate here: in a coal mine there is a machine, similar in appearance to a washing machine. <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> simulates a world in which magic and technology coexist, where the adventurer’s goal is to acquire all possible treasures. Nearby there is a heap of coal. The treasure here must be not located, but manufactured. By placing the coal in the machine and turning it on (this procedure requires a bit of figuring out), the coal is converted under pressure into a diamond. The puzzle requires some awareness of the properties of carbon, and also requires that the interactor understand that the system of this world is one in which engineers have, in many cases, provided useful devices in appropriate places.</p>
<p>A good scientist might happen upon the solution experimentally by placing different items in the machine and turning it on. What gives this puzzle the qualities of a riddle, if not the excellence of the best riddles, is that it is consistent with the logic of the world in which it occurs. More elaborate and poignant puzzles, tied in riddle-like ways to the worlds in which they occur and to the world outside, achieve more provocative and profound results. The riddle, unifying the literary and puzzle-solving aspects of IF, is the central figure in this form’s poesis.</p>
<h2>Machine</h2>
<p>A work of IF is not an “electronic document.” It is a program, parsing input and generating output based on rules. One reason that IF has been overlooked by hypertext theorists is that IF is not hypertext by most of the conflicting definitions that are offered; the view of it as a network of linked text is particularly strained and hides important aspects of IF. A broad category that recognizes the nature of IF and other new media artifacts as programs, such as Espen Aarseth’s (1997) cybertext, offers many critical benefits. It helps one understand that certain frustrations with IF are due to difficulty with or unwillingness to <span class="lightEmphasis">operate a machine</span> in order to generate text, and certain pleasures of IF come from engaging in this text/machine operation, or from reading that takes place in the context of operation.</p>
<h2>Defining Interactive Fiction</h2>
<p>A work of interactive fiction is a program that simulates a world, understands natural-language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world. This definition includes everything that is commonly held by IF authors and interactors to be IF, excludes new media artifacts that are similar but not commonly held to be IF, and sheds light on the elements that are truly essential to the form:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Simulation of a world</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Natural-language understanding</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Natural-language generation</p>
<h2>Understanding Interactive Fiction</h2>
<p>By definition, IF is neither a “story” or a “game,” but, as all IF developers know, a “world” combined with a parser and instructions for generating text based on events in the world. The riddle is central to understanding how the IF world functions as both literature and puzzle. Interestingly, the riddle is a part of the literary tradition of poetry, not that tradition of the novel more often associated with IF. This means that despite the common nomenclature of IF works as “games,” the IF program as a “story” file, and the work of IF as an electronic “novel,” none of these three figures are of central importance to IF.</p>
<p>It’s time to look beyond “story” and “game” for those other figures that are essential to different sorts of new media artifacts, and to recognize that views of “story” and “game” as simple overarching categories can be counterproductive. Rather than only race back and forth between narratology and game studies for further insights into the “story” and “game” of IF, for instance, it makes sense for those seeking to understand IF and those trying to improve their authorship in the form to consider the aspects of world, language understanding, and riddle by looking to architecture, artificial intelligence, and poetry. <cite id="note_7">I continue the discussion of the nature of IF, describe the history of the form, and approach some of the major IF works critically in my book <span class="booktitle">Twisty Little Passages</span> (The MIT Press, 2003).</cite></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="murrayr1">Janet Murray responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="laurelr2">Brenda Laurel responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="montfortr2">Nick Montfort responds</a></p>
<h2>References: Literature</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>—. (2001). <span class="booktitle">Comparative Media Studies Seminar</span>, MIT, February 8, 2001.</p>
<p>Aristotle (translated by S. H. Butcher, introduction by Francis Fergusson (1961). <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>. New York: Hill and Wang.</p>
<p>Buckles, Mary Ann (1985). “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of California San Diego.</p>
<p>Herz, J.C., Henry Jenkins, Janet Murray, Ken Perlin, Celia Pearce, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Eric Zimmerman (2001). “Game-Stories: Simulation, Narrative, Addiction.” Panel at SIGGRAPH 2001, Los Angeles, August 17, 2001.</p>
<p>Juul, Jesper (2001). “Games Telling Stories?,” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (July 2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts">http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts</a>.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System,” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University.</p>
<p>—. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. Boston: Addison Wesley.</p>
<p>Lebling, P. David, Mark S. Blank and Timothy A. Anderson (1979). “Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game,” <span class="journaltitle">IEEE Computer</span> 12 no. 4 (April 1979): 51ñ59.</p>
<p>Nelson, Graham (2001). <span class="booktitle">The Inform Designer’s Manual</span>, 4th edition. St. Charles, Illinois: The Interactive Fiction Library.</p>
<p>Pinsky, Robert (1997). MIT Media Lab Colloquium, February 5, 1997.</p>
<p>Prince, Gerald (1973). <span class="booktitle">A Grammar of Stories</span>. The Hague: Mouton.</p>
<p>Randall, Neil (1988). “Determining Literariness In Interactive Fiction.” <span class="booktitle">Computers and the Humanities</span> 22: 183ñ191.</p>
<p>Shelley, Bruce, Warren Spector, and Eric Zimmerman (2000). “Aesthetics of Game Design.” Panel at Computers and Video Games Come of Age, MIT, February 11, 2000.</p>
<p>Shklovsky, Victor (translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965). “Art as Technique.” In <span class="booktitle">Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays</span>. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Will Crowther (1975) and Don Woods (1976). 1975/1976.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Amnesia</span>. Thomas M. Disch, programmed by Kevin Bentley; Electronic Arts. 1986.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Curses</span>. Graham Nelson. 1993.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Exhibition</span>. Ian Finley. 1999.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Galatea</span>. Emily Short. 2000.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>. Steven Meretzky; Infocom. 1985.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span>. Robert Pinsky, programmed by Steve Hales and William Mataga; Synapse/Br¯derbund. 1984.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Photopia</span>. Adam Cadre. 1998.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Trinity</span>. Brian Moriarty; Infocom. 1986.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Zork</span>. Timothy Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling; Infocom. 1977ñ1979.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-ann-buckles">mary ann buckles</a>, <a href="/tags/jc-herz">j.c. herz</a>, <a href="/tags/henry-jenkins">henry jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/ken-perlin">ken perlin</a>, <a href="/tags/celia-pearce">celia pearce</a>, <a href="/tags/noah-wardrip-fruin">Noah Wardrip-Fruin</a>, <a href="/tags/eric-zimmerman">eric zimmerman</a>, <a href="/tags/game-story">game-story</a>, <a href="/tags/jesper-juul">jesper juul</a>, <a href="/tags/games-telling-stories">games telling stories</a>, <a href="/tags/brenda-laurel">brenda laurel</a>, <a href="/tags/computers-theatre">computers as theatre</a>, <a href="/tags/zork">zork</a>, <a href="/tags/graham-nelson">graham nelson</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1055 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comGenre Troublehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
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<div class="field-item even">Espen Aarseth</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-21</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Introduction: Stories and Games</h2>
<p>Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be “texts,” and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games’ generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from <span class="foreignWord">media non grata</span> to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.</p>
<p>The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping “the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure” (to quote from the ad in <span class="filmtitle">Blade Runner</span>). As with any land rush, the respect for local culture and history is minimal, while the belief in one’s own tradition, tools, and competence is unfailing. Computer game studies is virgin soil, ready to be plotted and plowed by the machineries of cultural and textual studies. What better way to map the territory than by using the trusty, dominant paradigm of stories and storytelling? The story perspective has many benefits: it is safe, trendy, and flexible. In a (Western) world troubled by addiction, attention deficiency, and random violence, stories are morally and aesthetically acceptable. In stories, meaning can be controlled (despite what those deconstructionists may have claimed). Storytelling is a valuable skill, the main mode of successful communication. And theories of storytelling are (seemingly) universal: they can be applied to and explain any medium, phenomenon, or culture. So why should not games also be a type of story?</p>
<p>In the context of computer games (and in most other contexts as well) stories and storytelling appear to be extremely old phenomena, spanning all of media history, and numerous media technologies. Show me a medium not suited to storytelling: it is probably a completely useless one. Computer games, with scarcely forty years of history, represent a mere last few seconds in the long evolutionary history of storytelling. Clearly, when we compare stories to computer games, stories hold a much stronger position, which games cannot dream of reaching in the near future. Well, that is the optimistic version. Some see it in pessimistic terms; in the words of a prominent Scandinavian literary theorist, computer games are a sign of cultural decay. Perhaps they need a new name - how about “interactive narratives”?</p>
<p>There are many types of comparativism. It can be dangerous, especially when one object is cherished and well-known, and the other is marginal and suspect. And in the context of this general story/game discussion, we have the danger of generic criticism. You know the kind that goes: “Traditional music is much better than jazz,” or “Novels are a higher art form than movies.” If we judge individual works on the basis of their genre, we may have lost already.</p>
<p>But what about stories and games? To address computer games as a consistent genre or medium is highly problematic. From <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> on a mobile phone to <span class="booktitle">Super Mario</span> on a Gameboy to <span class="booktitle">Everquest</span> on a Midi-tower Windows machine there is a rather large span of different genres, social contexts, and media technologies. It cannot be repeated often enough that the computer is not a medium, but a flexible material technology that will accomodate many very different media. Hence, there is no “computer medium” with one set of fixed capabilities, nor is there “the medium of the computer game.” Games are, at best, a somewhat definable cultural genre.</p>
<p>No doubt the same can be said for stories. However, if we compare them as cultural traditions, their positions become more equal. How can that be? Well, computer games are games, and games are not new, but very old, probably older than stories. It could even be argued that games are older than human culture, since even animals play games. You don’t see cats or dogs tell each other stories, but they will play. And games are interspecies communication: you can’t tell your dog a story, but the two of you can play together.</p>
<p>So, rather than being a newcomer, computer games are games in a new material technology, just as print novels were literature in a new technology 500 years ago. Yet, it seems, “we” only discovered games as cultural artifacts a few years ago. Before that, games were not an object for aesthetic study, but relegated to the study of children and primitive cultures, with a very few notable exceptions, such as Brian Sutton-Smith (Sutton-Smith 1997). However, games are not camera-ready pieces of art either. Because games are not one form, but many, they cannot be one art form. And why would aesthetics be the most relevant perspective? Some games may have artistic ambitions, others do not. Games are games, a rich and extremely diverse family of practices, and share qualities with performance arts (play, dance, music, sports) material arts, (sculpture, painting, architecture, gardening) and the verbal arts (drama, narrative, the epos). But fundamentally, they are games. The artistic elements are merely supports for what the Finnish avant garde writer and game theorist Markku Eskelinen calls “the gaming situation,” the gameplay (Eskelinen 2001).</p>
<p>Are games texts? The best reason I can think of why one would ask such a crude question is because one is a literary or semiotic theorist and wants to believe in the relevance of one’s training.</p>
<p>Games are not “textual” or at least not primarily textual: where is the text in chess? We might say that the <span class="lightEmphasis">rules</span> of chess constitute its “text,” but there is no recitation of the rules during gameplay, so that would reduce the textuality of chess to a subtextuality or a paratextuality. A central “text” does not exist – merely context. Any game consists of three aspects: (1) rules, (2) a material/semiotic system (a gameworld), and (3) gameplay (the events resulting from application of the rules to the gameworld). Of these three, the semiotic system is the most coincidental to the game. As the Danish theorist and game designer Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001b), games are eminently themeable: you can play chess with some rocks in the mud, or with pieces that look like the Simpson family rather than kings and queens. It would still be the same game. The “royal” theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently (see <a href="/thread/firstperson/aside" class="internal">sidebar</a>). When I play, I don’t even see her body, but see through it and past it. In addition to these three components, there is the player’s active knowledge of the game, in the form of strategies and performance techniques, and mental topographies, as well as written guides and other paratextual information about the games.</p>
<p>It follows that games are not intertextual either; games are self-contained. You don’t need to have played poker or ludo to understand chess, and knowledge of roulette will not help you to understand Russian roulette. (Neither will cultural knowledge of Russia. On the other hand, <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> is also a dangerous Russian game…) Knowing <span class="booktitle">Star Wars: The Phantom Menace</span> will not make you better at playing <span class="booktitle">Pod Racer</span> (Juul 2001a). Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a whole new meaning, the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined unambivalently by the rules. Among the many differences between games and stories, one of the most obvious is that of ambiguity. In <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span>, I do not stop to ponder what those bricks are really supposed to be made of. In <span class="booktitle">Doom</span>, there is no moral dilemma resulting from the killing of probably innocent monsters. The pleasure of games is quite different from the pleasures of the novel: for a chess or <span class="booktitle">Tetris</span> player, replaying is the norm, while most novels are read only once. You can be an expert chess player without playing any other game, but to understand even a single novel you will need to have studied numerous others.</p>
<p>Certainly many – indeed most – games, use texts much the same way food products do (“boil the spaghetti for seven minutes”), but it seems unreasonable therefore to claim that food is textual. And in driving your car, you are constantly reading the traffic signs and the meters on your dashboard, but we still don’t consider driving cars as a subgenre of reading.</p>
<p>However, the (academic) discovery of computer games over the last two decades is accompanied by the most smothering form of generic criticism: the attempt to reform games into a more acceptable form of art, literature or film; i.e., as narratives. Shakespeare’s <span class="booktitle">Hamlet</span> was pretty good, but soon we can have something even better: <span class="booktitle">Hamlet the Game</span>. This idea, termed the “Holodeck myth” by Marie-Laure Ryan (2001) with reference to Janet Murray’s book <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span> (1997), was first proposed by Brenda Laurel (1986; 1991) as a form of computer-controlled real-time participant drama, and attempted by research projects such as Joseph Bates’ Oz project at Carnegie Mellon University. As a theory, this narrativistic colonialism might seem aesthetically problematic (Aarseth 1997, chapter six), as well as technologically unachievable (Bringsjord 2001), but there are many versions of it, and some are more sophisticated than others.</p>
<h2>The Story-Game Ideology</h2>
<p>Underlying the drive to reform games as “interactive narratives,” as they are sometimes called, lies a complex web of motives, from economic (“games need narratives to become better products”), elitist and eschatological (“games are a base, low-cultural form; let’s try to escape the humble origins and achieve `literary’ qualities”), to academic colonialism (“computer games are narratives, we only need to redefine narratives in such a way that these new narrative forms are included”). At a recent game conference, it was stated that the difference between films and games was simply the “interactivity” of the games.</p>
<p>This latter motive, the only one of the three mentioned before to concern us here, seems to me to spring out of a certain ideology, much practiced by humanists, and also well beyond our ivory towers; an ideology that we might call “narrativism.” This is the notion that everything is a story, and that story-telling is our primary, perhaps only, mode of understanding, our cognitive perspective on the world. Life is a story, this discussion is a story, and the building that I work in is also a story, or better, an architectural narrative. Ironically, most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.</p>
<p>Yet among anthropologists, business people, technologists, visual artists, media theorists, and other laypersons, this ideology – or what Alan Rauch once fittingly called <span class="lightEmphasis">story fetishism</span> – is strong and uncontested. And to us humanists, the (let’s face it) lowest caste of the academic world, it is nice to feel important again, for once. Finally, our expertise matters! We don’t know much about technology, or biology, but we do know stories and storytelling. So why be critical when we can be important instead?</p>
<p>So, then, is storytelling the solution to all the world’s problems, from business strategies to computer game design? If rhetoric is indeed our game, then we should be able to see through this one. But it is a very nice dream.</p>
<p>And this is of course not an attack on the importance of stories. Storytelling has been, and still is, the dominant form of cultural expression. But it is not the only game in town, the only mode of discourse. It is quite possible, not to mention necessary, to identify other modes, games among them, as alternatives to storytelling. But what exactly is the relationship between games and stories? Is it a dichotomy? A rivalry? Or perhaps a continuum? As Eskelinen has pointed out, both stories and games are medium-independent. A story can be translated from novel to comic book, to movie, to TV series, to opera, etc. A game can be translated from board and dice, to a live role-play out in the woods, to numbers and letters on a screen, to a three-dimensional virtual world. From <span class="booktitle">SpaceWar</span> (1961) to <span class="booktitle">Star Raiders</span> (1979), <span class="booktitle">Elite</span> (1984), to <span class="booktitle">X - Beyond the Frontier</span> (1999), not much has happened in the rules and gameplay: the games have increasingly better 3D graphics, but the theme and objectives remain the same. <span class="booktitle">Rogue</span> (1980) and <span class="booktitle">Diablo</span> (1997) are basically the same game (see <a href="/thread/firstperson/aside" class="internal">sidebar</a>).</p>
<p>What is lost in translation? In the various versions of a story, key events and relationships remain; in the versions of a game, the rules remain. <cite id="note_1">The following discussion builds on Juul (2001a).</cite> But when we try to translate a game into a story, what happens to the rules? What happens to the gameplay? And a story into a game: what happens to the plot? And, to use Marie-Laure Ryan’s example (2001), what player, in the game version of <span class="booktitle">Anna Karenina</span>, playing the main character, Holodeck style, would actually commit suicide, even virtually? Novels are very good at relating the inner lives of characters (films perhaps less so); games are awful at that, or, wisely, they don’t even try. We might say that, unlike literature, games are not about the Other, they are about the Self. Games focus on self-mastery and exploration of the external world, not exploration of interpersonal relationships (except for multiplayer games). Or when they try to, like the recent bestselling games <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> or <span class="booktitle">Black and White</span>, it is from a godlike, Asmodean perspective.</p>
<p>The aim of <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is to control and shape the interactions and daily life of your characters, not take human form yourself. Nevertheless, games like <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> are sometimes (not often) used as storytelling machines, when particularly memorable moments in the game are retold by the player/god. But this is not translation from game to story, this is simply good old after-the-fact narration, like the football column in the Monday sports section, the lab experiment report, or the slide show of one’s Carribean vacation. Something interesting happened, and we want to tell others about it. Ontologically, the capacity for generating memorable moments is something games have in common with real life, as well as with stories. A story-generating system does not have to be a story itself. In fact, while life and games are primary, real-time phenomena, consisting of real or virtual events, stories are secondary phenomena, a revision of the primary event, or a revision of a revision, etc.</p>
<p>And yet, we do have games inspired by films and novels, and vice versa: <span class="booktitle">The Hobbit</span>, <span class="booktitle">The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</span>, <span class="booktitle">Super Mario Brothers</span>, <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span>, <span class="booktitle">Goldeneye</span>, <span class="booktitle">Blade Runner</span>; the list is nearly endless. Are they not translations?</p>
<p>Genre theory can help us describe what goes on here: John Cawelti’s (1976) distinction between “underlying form” and “specific cultural conventions” would tell us that the underlying form (narrative structure or game rules) remains untranslatable, but the cultural conventions, such as the setting and character types of, say, <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span>, are translated. While, as Jesper Juul has pointed out (Juul 2001a), the story of <span class="booktitle">Star Wars</span> is unextractable from the game of the same name, the setting, atmosphere and characters can be deduced. So, although nonnarrative and nonludic elements can be translated, the key elements, the narration and the gameplay, like oil and water, are not easily mixed.</p>
<h2>Story-Game Hybrids: The Adventure Game Genre</h2>
<p>And yet, there is a game genre that may also be called narrative. This is the so-called adventure game, a computer game genre that was born in 1976, when Donald Woods turned William Crowther’s text-based cave simulation into a fantasy game. This game, <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>, which consists of moving through a labyrinthine cave by solving puzzles (“how to get past the snake,” etc.), has a storylike, episodic structure, where the player/hero progresses in a linear fashion through the maze. For a while very popular, this textual genre died out commercially in the late 1980s when graphical computer games took over the market.</p>
<p>Structurally, however, it lives on in graphical computer games such as <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> (1993) and <span class="booktitle">Half-Life</span> (1997), where the same deterministic linearity and rule system dominate the play. By looking at sales figures, it could be claimed that these games successfully demonstrate the potential for combining stories and games. However, sales figures are not a reliable measure of artistic success, or – dare we say – quality. And according to one of the successful designer brothers of <span class="booktitle">Myst</span>, Robyn Miller, artistically <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> was a frustrating project. Miller, arguably one of the most successful game designers ever, later stopped making games and turned to animated movies, because he felt the game format in conflict with storytelling and character development. And there was this annoying intervening person, the player, to put up with. Most critics agree that the Miller brothers succeeded eminently in making a fascinating visual landscape, a haunting and beautiful gameworld, but to experienced gamers, the gameplay was boring and derivative, with the same linear structure that was introduced by the first <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span> game sixteen years earlier. Nice video graphics, shame about the game.</p>
<p>The greatest aesthetic problem for the adventure story-game seems to be believable characters. In the first adventure game there were just animals and monsters, and hardly any dialogue, and in <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> there were no characters at all, except for in a few static video sequences. In more dramatic adventure games, the characters’ behavior is totally prescripted, with a few lines repeated endlessly and brainlessly. The dramatic ambitions of these games remain unfulfilled and seem as unreachable as ever. What keeps the genre alive is increasingly more photorealistic, detailed three-dimensional graphical environments, but apart from that, it is mostly the same story-game over and over again. Unlike other games, but like most novels, these games are normally only played once, and typically not completed. This makes them very different from other games. Players are often stuck on one of the puzzles, and have no choice but either to buy the solutions book, download a “walkthrough” guide from the Internet, or give up. Perhaps we could say that this genre is really only one and the same game, the same rule system repeated over and over with variable cultural conventions and increasingly better technology.</p>
<p>As Robyn Miller suggested, the aesthetic problem in these games is a conflict between the opposing goals of gameplay and storytelling. Adventure games seldom, if at all, contain good stories. Even the most entertaining of these games, like Warren Spector’s <span class="booktitle">Deus Ex</span> (1999), contains a cliched storyline that would make a B-movie writer blush, and characters so wooden that they make <span class="booktitle">The Flintstones</span> look like Strindberg. The gameplay is constrained by the story in unrealistic ways (in <span class="booktitle">Deus Ex</span>, if you try to kill the secretary, it is simply not possible, because it does not fit the storyline). What makes such games playable at all, and indeed attractive, is the sequence of shifting, exotic, often fascinating settings (levels), where you explore the topography and master the virtual environment. The gameworld is its own reward, and the end, if and when it comes, does not offer dramatic satisfaction, but a feeling of limbo. There is no turning back, and no going forward. You are no longer employed by the game. Time to buy another.</p>
<h2>The Art of Simulation</h2>
<p>Other game genres may also employ storylines. In god-games such as <span class="booktitle">Civilization</span>, history itself plays the role of storyline. In strategy games such as <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span>, <span class="booktitle">Command and Conquer</span>, <span class="booktitle">Warcraft</span>, or role-playing games such as <span class="booktitle">Ultima Underworld</span> or <span class="booktitle">Diablo</span>, the story is often an episodic progression between levels, with each level constituting a self-enclosed episode, like the individual matches in a football cup. True to their war-oriented themes, these series of levels are often called campaigns. A successful game such as <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span> will offer both multilevel campaigns and stand-alone levels or “maps” (gameworlds), sometimes generated randomly by the game software. A randomly generated map can be just as satisfying to play as a human-authored gameworld or campaign, and this tells us that the real aesthetic quality of these games is in the design of the rule system, rather than in the design of the gameworld.</p>
<p>The pleasures of video games, as James Newman (2001) has pointed out, comparing <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> to the cartoonish-looking <span class="booktitle">Super Mario Kart</span>, are not primarily visual, but kinaesthetic, functional and cognitive. Your skills are rewarded, your mistakes punished, quite literally. The game gaze is not the same as the cinema gaze, although I fear it will be a long time before film critics studying computer games will understand the difference. (Alongside narrativism, there is the equally problematic visualism.) But pleasure follows function, we might say. When it is there at all, the story in these games is superficial, like a bored taxi driver whose only function is to take us on to the next ludic event. In the case of <span class="booktitle">Heroes of Might and Magic</span>, story fragments pop up at specific times in a level. They are completely superfluous, like illustrations in a storybook, and ignoring them will not affect the gameplay at all.</p>
<p>The hidden structure behind these, and most, computer games is not narrative – or that silly and abused term, “interactivity” – but <span class="lightEmphasis">simulation</span>. Simulation is the key concept, a bottom-up hermeneutic strategy that forms the basis of so many cognitive activities: all sorts of training, from learning to pilot a plane to learning to command troops, but also the use of spreadsheets, urban planning, architectural design and CAD, scientific experiments, reconstructive surgery, and generative linguistics. And in entertainment: computer games. If you want to understand a phenomenon, it is not enough to be a good storyteller, you need to understand how the parts work together, and the best way to do that is to build a simulation. Through the hermeneutic circle of simulation/construction, testing, modification, more testing, and so forth, the model is moved closer to the simulated phenomenon.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">The computer game is the art of simulation</span>. A subgenre of simulation, in other words. Strategy games are sometimes misleadingly called “simulation” games, but all computer games contain simulation. Indeed, it is the dynamic aspect of the game that creates a consistent gameworld. Simulation is the hermeneutic Other of narratives; the alternative mode of discourse, bottom up and emergent where stories are top-down and preplanned. In simulations, knowledge and experience is created by the player’s actions and strategies, rather than recreated by a writer or moviemaker.</p>
<p>Culturally, especially in “high culture,” stories dominate still, but are currently losing ground to the new simulation-based discourse-types, e.g., in the entertainment market, where movies are being outsold by computer games. Stories and simulations are not totally incompatible, but the simulation, as a primary phenomenon, must form the basis of any combination of the two, and not vice versa, just as with stories and life. When you have built a simulation, such as a rule-based gameworld, you may use it to tell stories in (or for other purposes); but stories, on the other hand, can only contain simulations in a metaphorical sense, such as the movie <span class="booktitle">Groundhog Day</span>, or Tad Williams’ <span class="booktitle">Otherland</span> novels.</p>
<p>In the adventure games where there is a conflict between narrative and ludic aesthetics, it is typically the simulation that, on its own, allows actions that the story prohibits, or which make the story break down. Players exploit this to invent strategies that make a mockery of the author’s intentions. Dead or not, the authors of these games are little more than ghosts in the machine, and hardly <span class="lightEmphasis">auteurs</span>. When you put a story on top of a simulation, the simulation (or the player) will always have the last word.</p>
<p>It is time to recognize simulation and the need to simulate as a major new hermeneutic discourse mode, coinciding with the rise of computer technology, and with roots in games and playing.</p>
<h2>But What about Literature?</h2>
<p>But what about that other type of hybrid: not games with narrative ambitions, but narratives with game elements? Why don’t we look at texts that play games?, you may well ask. There is a long tradition of playful texts, from <span class="booktitle">Tristram Shandy</span> via detective stories and the OuLiPo, to experimental texts that happen to be digital; and some of these are of course very worthy of critical attention. John McDaid’s <span class="booktitle">Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse</span> (1991) springs to mind. But here I wanted to address the structure of gaming in its nonmetaphorical form. When we try to guess the murderer in a Poirot novel, we are adding a coincidental game to the story. The guessing game is not necessary, and the narrator doesn’t care whether we play or not. If we happen to guess correctly early on, nothing different happens in the novel. Worse, we may even stop reading prematurely, since the ending has become obvious and boring. These novels are games only in a metaphorical sense; they tease us, but we are not real players. In the case of hypertext fictions, we are explorers, but without recognizable rules, there is no real game. To equalize these metaphorical games with a real game is to marginalize an already (academically) marginal phenomenon, to privilege the <span class="lightEmphasis">illusion</span> of play over real play. And for game scholars, that is a poor strategy.</p>
<p>Literary experiments are either interesting or they are not. What medium they take place in should have little or nothing to do with it. In a world where practically all the arts use digital technology, it is only natural that literature also should do so, but hardly revolutionary. Generic criticism is a problem, whether it favors or marginalizes digital literature. Either way it is a kind of discrimination.</p>
<p>Katherine Hayles, the influential U.S. theorist of science and literature, recently rose to defend electronic literature as the endangered hybrid species produced by computer games and literature:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">While it is understandable that scholars fighting for critical turf want to claim all of the territory for themselves, the nature of the beast called electronic literature cannot be adequately understood if it is orphaned on either side of the family tree. From computer games come interactivity, major tropes such as searching for keys to a central mystery, and multiple narrative pathways chosen by interactors; from literary traditions come devices developed over millennia of experimentation and criticism such as point of view, narrative voice and literary allusions. To omit either of these resources would be to reduce electronic literature to something beyond our recognition. (Hayles 2001)</p>
<p>While I share Hayles’ concern that electronic literature should not be killed off in the border wars between game scholars and narrativists, I think her paternity case is rather weak. The real father of electronic literature is not computer games, but the computer interface itself. And the result, in the form of hypernovels such as Michael Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span> (1991), or generative poetry such as John Cayley’s <span class="booktitle">The Speaking Clock</span> (1995), is no hybrid, it is literature. The real game-literature hybrid, the textual adventure game, still lives on in the prolific amateur groups such as rec.arts.int-fiction on the Internet, but seems to have little influence on either game culture or literary culture in general.</p>
<p>Digital literature is still literature, pure, if not simple. When I can read a <span class="booktitle">Harry Potter</span> novel on my Palm Pilot, paper is no longer an integral part of literature’s material or ideological foundations. Digital literature, whether experimental like Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia” (2000) or strictly mainstream like Stephen King’s “Riding the Bullet” (2000), is still literature, not a hybrid. Like our ATM cards, which are just as real (and just as symbolic) as paper money, digital literature is real literature.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: From Multiplayers to Players</h2>
<p>The aesthetics and hermeneutics of games and simulations and their relations to stories (and also to knowledge production) pose a rich problem, of which I have only scratched the surface here. This is the kind of problem that makes aesthetic research meaningful and gratifying. Games and stories have distinct teleologies and artistic potentials, and it is analytically useful (for those of us genuinely interested in games as games, at least) to maintain a conceptual terminology that distinguishes between them. As I have argued here, the traditional hermeneutic paradigms of text, narrative and semiotics are not well-suited to the problems of a simulational hermeneutic. Games (as games) might be the best empirical entry point to this new mode of discourse, at least if we continue the humanist tradition of privileging artistic genres in our hermeneutic research.</p>
<p>My warnings about narrativism and theoretical colonialism might seem unduly harsh and even militant. Why not let the matter resolve itself, through scholarly, logical dialogue? The reason for this vigilance, however, is based on numbers. The sheer number of students trained in film and literary studies will ensure that the slanted and crude misapplication of “narrative” theory to games will continue and probably overwhelm game scholarship for a long time to come. As long as vast numbers of journals and supervisors from traditional narrative studies continue to sanction dissertations and papers that take the narrativity of games for granted and confuse the story-game hybrids with games in general, good, critical scholarship on games will be outnumbered by incompetence, and this is a problem for all involved. Hopefully this is just a short-lived phase, but it certainly is a phase that we are in right now. As more scholars from other disciplines, such as sociology, linguistics, history, economics, and geography, start to do research on games, perhaps the narrativist camp (and the <span class="lightEmphasis">visualist</span> camp) will realize more of the many differences between games and narratives, and even contribute valuable analyses using (and not abusing) narratology, but until then the narrativist paradigm will but slowly melt.</p>
<p>The weak and repetitive tradition of adventure story-games such as <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> and <span class="booktitle">Half-Life</span> should not be given our privileged, undivided attention, just because they remind us more of the movies and novels we used to study. Compared to replayable games such as <span class="booktitle">Warcraft</span> and <span class="booktitle">Counter-Strike</span>, the story-games do not pose a very interesting theoretical challenge for game studies, once we have identified their dual heritage. There are so many more important aesthetic questions to ask of better and more successful games, in particular multiplayer games. What kind of socioaesthetic exchange goes on in the South Korean multiplayer game <span class="booktitle">Lineage</span>, with two million active players? These games are not only the future of gaming, they are huge social experiments that will affect and shape the future of human communication. They will probably use stories, too; not as the overarching design principle, but as rhetorical, interplayer communication strategies, like we all do in our ordinary lives. Ever more advanced online, multiplayer games, with real instead of artificial intelligences, and ever more sophisticated simulation-worlds, will set the agenda for game studies in the coming years. But they probably won’t be called online, multiplayer games for much longer. Or “interactive narratives.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">Just games, once again.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/vigilant" class="internal">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/insurgent" class="internal">Stuart Moulthrop responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/lawful" class="internal">Chris Crawford responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/algorithmic" class="internal">Espen Aarseth responds</a></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>Bringsjord, Selmer (2001). “Is It Possible to Build Dramatically Compelling Interactive Digital Entertainment?” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/bringsjord/</a>.</p>
<p>Cawelti, John (1976). <span class="booktitle">Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>Cayley, John (1995). <span class="booktitle">Speaking Clock</span>. <a href="http://www.shadoof.net/in/incat.html#CLOCK" class="outbound">http://www.shadoof.net/in/incat.html#CLOCK</a>.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (July 2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/</a>.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine (2001). “Cyber|literature and Multicourses: Rescuing Electronic Literature from Infanticide.” <span class="journaltitle">Electronic Book Review</span> 11 (2001). <a href="/electropoetics/interspecial" class="internal">http://altx.com/ebr/riposte/rip11/rip11hay.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael (1991). <span class="booktitle">afternoon</span>. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.</p>
<p>Juul, Jesper (2001a). “Games Telling Stories? A Brief Note on Games and Narratives.” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001b). “Game Time, Event Time, Themability.” Presented at the CGDT Conference, Copenhagen, March 1, 2001.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System.” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.</p>
<p>—. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talan (2000). Lexia to Perplexia. <span class="journaltitle">Electronic Book Review</span> 11. <a href="/imagenarrative/perplex" class="internal">http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr11/</a>.</p>
<p>Murray, Janet (1997). <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace</span>. New York: The Free Press.</p>
<p>King, Stephen (2000). <span class="booktitle">Riding the Bullet</span>. New York: Scribner eBook.</p>
<p>Newman, James (2001). “Reconfiguring the Videogame Player.” Games Cultures Conference, Bristol, June 30, 2001.</p>
<p>Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001). “Beyond Myth and Metaphor - The Case of Narrative in Digital Media.” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no. 1 (2001). <a href="http://gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/" class="outbound">http://gamestudies.org/0101/ryan/</a>.</p>
<p>Sutton-Smith, Brian (1997). <span class="booktitle">The Ambiguity of Play</span>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/game">game</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/gameplay">gameplay</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/blade-runner">blade runner</a>, <a href="/tags/tetris">tetris</a>, <a href="/tags/super-mario">super mario</a>, <a href="/tags/everquest">everquest</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/lara-croft">lara croft</a>, <a href="/tags/tomb-raider">tomb raider</a>, <a href="/tags/jesper-juul">jesper juul</a>, <a href="/tags/poker">poker</a>, <a href="/tags/ludo">ludo</a>, <a href="/tags/chess">chess</a>, <a href="/tags/roulette">roulette</a>, <a href="/tags/star-wars">star wars</a>, <a href="/tags/doom">doom</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet">hamlet</a>, <a href="/tags/shakespeare">shakespeare</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet-holodeck">hamlet on the holodeck</a>, <a href="/tags/br">br</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator949 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant#commentsA Preliminary Poeticshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/aristotelean
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Mateas</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986; Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle’s dramatic theory, but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency. This theory both provides design guidance for interactive dramatic experiences that attempt to maximize player agency (answering the question “What should I build?”) and technical direction for the AI work necessary to build the system (answering the question “How should I build it?”). In addition to clarifying notions of interactive drama, the model developed in this essay also provides a general framework for analyzing player agency in any interactive experience (e.g., interactive games).</p>
<p>This neo-Aristotelian theory integrates Murray’s (1998) proposed aesthetic categories for interactive stories and Aristotle’s structural categories for drama. The theory borrows from Laurel’s treatment of Aristotle in an interactive context (Laurel 1986, 1991) but extends it by situating Murray’s category of agency within the model; the new model provides specific design guidelines for maximizing user agency. First, I present the definition of interactive drama motivating this theory and situate this definition with respect to other notions of interactive story. Next, I present Murray’s three categories of immersion, agency, and transformation. Then, I present a model of Aristotle’s categories relating them in terms of formal and material causation. Within this model, agency will be situated as two new causal chains inserted at the level of character. Finally, I use the resulting model to clarify conceptual and technical issues involved in building interactive dramatic worlds, and briefly describe a current project informed by this model.</p>
<h2>Defining Interactive Drama</h2>
<p>Many game designers, writers, and theorists have wrestled with the vexing question, “What is interactive story?” This paper continues a specific thread of discussion with respect to this question, the thread begun by Laurel’s adoption of an Aristotelian framework first for interactive drama (Laurel 1986) and then more generally for interactive experiences (Laurel 1991) and continued by Murray’s description of the experiential pleasures and properties of interactive stories (Murray 1998). Whereas Murray explores a variety of interactive story types, this essay focuses explicitly on the notion of interactive drama as defined in Laurel’s thesis (Laurel 1986) and pursued by the Oz Project at Carnegie Mellon University (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Weyhrauch 1997).</p>
<p>In this conception of interactive drama, the player assumes the role of a first-person character in a dramatic story. The player does not sit above the story, watching it as in a simulation, but is immersed <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span> the story.</p>
<p>Following Laurel, dramatic (Aristotelian) stories are distinguished from narrative stories by the following properties:</p>
<p>Enactment vs. Description</p>
<p>Intensification vs. Extensification</p>
<p>Unity of Action vs. Episodic Structure</p>
<p>Enactment refers to action. Dramas utilize action rather than description to tell a story. Intensification is achieved by arranging incidents so as to intensify emotion and condense time. In contrast, narrative forms often “explode” incidents by offering many interpretations of the same incident, examining the incident from multiple perspectives, and expanding time. Unity of action refers to the arrangement of incidents such that they are all causally related to a central action. One central theme organizes all the incidents that occur in the story. Narratives tend to employ episodic structure, in which the story consists of a collection of causally unrelated incidents.</p>
<p>Certainly not all interactive story experiences must have the properties of Aristotelian drama. In fact, most interactive story experiences built to date have either been highly episodic (generally those narrative experiences built by the game industry, e.g., adventure games), have employed a hypertextual logic of association rather than a logic of dramatic probability and causality (generally those experiences built by fine artists and writers), or have focused on story not as a highly structured experience created by an author for consumption by an audience, but rather as a shared social construction facilitating human communication (e.g., multiuser worlds such as MUDs, MOOs,and avatar spaces; massive multiplayer games such as <span class="booktitle">Everquest</span> and <span class="booktitle">Ultima Online</span>; and games such as Purple Moon’s <span class="booktitle">Rocket</span> series or Will Wright’s <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>). Additionally, the interaction in an interactive story does not necessarily have to be first-person interaction as a character within the story. The neo-Aristotelian poetics developed here informs a specific niche within the space of interactive narrative and provides a principled way of distinguishing this niche from other interactive narrative experiences.</p>
<h2>Murray’s Aesthetic Categories</h2>
<p>Murray (1998) proposes three aesthetic categories for the analysis of interactive story experiences: immersion, agency, and transformation.</p>
<p>Immersion is the feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein. Immersion is related to Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” – when a participant is immersed in an experience, they are willing to accept the internal logic of the experience, even though this logic deviates from the logic of the real world. A species of immersion is telepresence, the feeling of being physically present (from a first-person point of view) in a remote environment.</p>
<p>Agency is the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player’s intention. This is not mere interface activity. If there are many buttons and knobs for the player to twiddle, but all this twiddling has little effect on the experience, there is no agency. Furthermore, the effect must relate to the player intention. If, in manipulating the interface elements, the player does have an effect on the world, but they are not the effects that the player intended (perhaps the player was randomly trying things because they didn’t know what to do, or perhaps the player thought that an action would have one effect, but it instead had another), then there is no agency.</p>
<p>Transformation is the most problematic of Murray’s three categories. Transformation has at least three distinct meanings:</p>
<p>Transformation as masquerade. The game experience allows the player to transform themselves into someone else for the duration of the experience.</p>
<p>Transformation as variety. The game experience offers a multitude of variations on a theme. The player is able to exhaustively explore these variations and thus gain an understanding of the theme.</p>
<p>Personal transformation. The game experience takes the player on a journey of personal transformation.</p>
<p>Transformation as masquerade and variety can be seen as means to effect personal transformation.</p>
<h2>Integrating Agency into Aristotle</h2>
<p>Murray’s categories are phenomenological categories of the interactive story experience, that is, categories describing what it <span class="lightEmphasis">feels</span> like to participate in an interactive story. Aristotle’s categories (described later) are structural categories for the analysis of drama, that is, categories describing what <span class="lightEmphasis">parts</span> a dramatic story is made out of. The trick in developing a theoretical framework for interactive drama is integrating the phenomenological (that is, what it feels like) aspect of first-person experiences with the structural aspects of carefully crafted stories. In attempting this integration, I first discuss the primacy of the category of agency. Second, I briefly present an interpretation of the Aristotelian categories in terms of material and formal cause. Finally, agency is integrated into this model.</p>
<h2>Primacy of Agency</h2>
<p>From an interactive dramatic perspective, agency is the most fundamental of Murray’s three categories. Immersion, in the form of engagement, is already implied in the Aristotelian model. Engagement and identification with the protagonist are necessary in order for an audience to experience catharsis. Transformation, in the form of change in the protagonist, also already exists in the Aristotelian model. Murray’s discussion of transformation as variety, particularly in the form of the kaleidoscopic narrative that refuses closure, is contrary to the Aristotelian ideals of unity and intensification. To the extent that we want a model of interactive <span class="lightEmphasis">drama</span>, as opposed to interactive narrative, much of Murray’s discussion of transformation falls outside the scope of such a model. While immersion and transformation exist in some form in noninteractive drama, the audience’s sense of having agency within the story is a genuinely new experience enabled by interactivity. For these reasons, agency will be the category integrated with Aristotle.</p>
<h2>Aristotelian Drama</h2>
<p>Following Laurel (1991), Aristotle’s theory of drama is represented in Figure 3.1. </p>
<p><span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebressays/firstperson/aristotelean/Mateas1.gif"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/Mateas1.gif" width="177" height="144" border="0" style="float: right;" /></a></span></p>
<p>Aristotle analyzed plays in terms of six hierarchical categories, corresponding to different “parts” of a play. These categories are related via material cause and formal cause. The material cause of something is the material out of which the thing is created. For example, the material cause of a building is the building materials of which it is constructed. The formal cause of something is the abstract plan, goal, or ideal towards which something is heading. For example, the formal cause of a building is the architectural blueprints.</p>
<p>In drama, the formal cause is the authorial view of the play. The author has constructed a plot that attempts to explicate some theme. The characters required in the play are determined by the plot; the plot is the formal cause of the characters. A character’s thought processes are determined by the kind of character they are. The language spoken by the characters is determined by their thought. The patterns (song) present in the play are determined, to a large extent, by the characters’ language (more generally, their actions). The spectacle, the sensory display presented to the audience, is determined by the patterns enacted by the characters.</p>
<p>In drama, the material cause is the audience’s view of the play. The audience experiences a spectacle, a sensory display. In this display, the audience detects patterns. These patterns are understood as character actions (including language). Based on the character’s actions and spoken utterances, the audience infers the characters’ thought processes. Based on this understanding of the characters’ thought processes, the audience develops an understanding of the characters, the characters’ traits and propensities. Based on all this information, the audience understands the plot structure and the theme. In a successful play, the audience is then able to recapitulate the chain of formal causation. When the plot is understood, there should be an “a-ha” experience in which the audience is now able to understand how the characters relate to the plot (and why they must be the characters they are), why those types of characters think the way they do, why they took the actions they did and said what they did, how their speech and actions created patterns of activity, and how those patterns of activity resulted in the spectacle that the audience saw. By a process of interpretation, the audience works up the chain of material cause in order to recapitulate the chain of formal cause.</p>
<h2>Interactive Drama</h2>
<p>Adding interaction to the Aristotelian model can be considered the addition of two new causal chains at the level of character.</p>
<p>In Figure 3.2, the gray arrows are the traditional chains of material and formal causation. </p>
<p><span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebressays/firstperson/aristotelean/Mateas2.gif"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/Mateas2.gif" width="177" height="144" border="0" style="float: right;" /></a></span></p>
<p>The player has been added to the model as a character who can choose his or her own actions. This has the consequence of introducing two new causal chains. The player’s intentions become a new source of formal causation. By taking action in the experience, the player’s intentions become the formal cause of activity happening at the levels from language down to spectacle. But this ability to take action is not completely free; it is constrained from below by material resources and from above by authorial formal causation from the level of plot.</p>
<p>The elements present below the level of character provide the player with the material resources (material cause) for taking action. The only actions available are the actions supported by the material resources present in the game. The notion of affordance (Norman 1988) from interface design is useful here. In interface design, affordances are the opportunities for action made available by an object or interface. But affordance is even stronger than implied by the phrase “made available”; in order for an interface to be said to afford a certain action, the interface must in some sense “cry out” for the action to be taken. There should be a naturalness to the afforded action that makes it the obvious thing to do. For example, the handle on a teapot affords picking up the teapot with your hand. The handle cries out to be grasped. In a similar manner, the material resources in an interactive drama afford action. Thus these resources not only limit what actions can be taken (the negative form of constraint) but cry out to make certain actions obvious (the positive form of constraint). Several examples of the material affordances in interactive drama are provided later.</p>
<p>The characters in an interactive drama should be rich enough that the player can infer a consistent model of the characters’ thoughts. If the characters’ thoughts can be understood (e.g., goals, motivations, desires), then these thoughts become a material resource for player action. By reasoning about the other characters’ thoughts, the player can take actions to influence these characters, either to change their thoughts, or actively help or hinder them in their goals and plans.</p>
<p>The dialogue (language) spoken by the characters and the opportunities for the player to engage in dialogue are other material resources for action. Dialogue is a powerful means for characters to express their thoughts, thus instrumental for helping the player to infer a model of the characters’ thoughts. Conversely, dialogue is a powerful means to influence character behavior. If the experience makes dialogue available to the player (and most contemporary interactive experiences do not), this becomes a powerful resource for expressing player intention.</p>
<p>The objects available in the experience (I place the presence of interactive objects somewhere between spectacle and pattern) are yet another resource for player action.</p>
<p>Finally, the mechanics of interaction (spectacle) provide the low-level resources for player actions. The mechanics provide the interface conventions for taking action.</p>
<p>In addition to the material affordances (constraints) from below, the player experiences formal constraints from above. Of course, these constraints are not directly perceived by the player, but, just as in noninteractive drama, are understood by recapitulating the author’s chain of formal causation by making inferences along the chain of material causation. In noninteractive drama, understanding the formal chain of causation allows the audience to appreciate how all the action of the play stems from the dramatic necessity of the plot and theme. In interactive drama, the understanding of the formal causation from the level of plot to character additionally helps the player to have an understanding of what to do, that is, why they should take action within the story world at all. Just as the material constraints can be considered as affording action from the levels of spectacle through thought, the formal constraints afford motivation from the level of plot. This motivation is conveyed as dramatic probability. By understanding what actions are dramatically probable, the player understands what actions are worth considering.</p>
<h2>Agency</h2>
<p>We are now ready to propose a prescriptive, structural model for agency. <span class="lightEmphasis">A player will experience agency when there is a balance between the material and formal constraints</span>. When the actions motivated by the formal constraints (affordances) via dramatic probability in the plot are commensurate with the material constraints (affordances) made available from the levels of spectacle, pattern, language, and thought, then the player will experience agency. An imbalance results in a decrease in agency. This will be made clearer by considering several examples.</p>
<p>Many puzzle-based adventures suffer from the imbalance of providing more material affordances than formal affordances. This results in the feeling of having many things to do (places to go, objects to fiddle with) without having any sense of why any one action would be preferable to another. For example, <span class="booktitle">Zork Grand Inquisitor</span> offers a rich world to navigate and many objects to collect and manipulate. Yet, since there is no unity of action, there is no way to relate current actions to the eventual goal of defeating the Grand Inquisitor. This leaves the player in the position of randomly wandering about trying strange juxtapositions of objects. This detracts from the sense of agency – though the player can take action, this action is often not tied to a high-level player intention. Notice that adding more material opportunities for action would not help the matter. The problem is not a lack of options of things to do, the problem is having insufficient formal constraint to decide between choices.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Quake</span> (and its ilk) induce agency by providing a nice balance between material and formal constraints. The proto-plot establishes the following formal constraints (dramatic probabilities):</p>
<p>Everything that moves will try to kill you.</p>
<p>You should try to kill everything.</p>
<p>You should try to move through as many levels as possible.</p>
<p>From these three principles, all the rest of the action follows. The material affordances perfectly balance these formal affordances. The player can run swiftly and smoothly through the space. The player can pick up a wide array of lethal weapons. The player can fire these weapons at monsters and produce satisfying, gory deaths. The monsters’ behavior is completely consistent with the “kill or be killed” ethos. Everything that one would want to try and do given the formal constraints is doable. There are no extraneous actions available (for example, being able to strike up a conversation with a monster) that are not dictated by the formal constraints.</p>
<p>Note that though these example games are not specifically interactive drama, the model can still be used to analyze player agency within these games. Though the model is motivated by interactive drama, it can be used to analyze the sense of agency in any interactive experience by analyzing the experience in <span class="lightEmphasis">terms of the dramatic categories offered by the model</span>. For example, though Quake has neither plot nor characters in the strict sense, there are top-down player expectations established by a “proto-plot.” This “proto-plot” is communicated by the general design of the spectacle (e.g., the design of the creepy industrial mazes) as well as the actions of the characters, even if these characters do have primitive diction and thought.</p>
<p>Again, in order to invoke a sense of agency, an interactive experience must strike a balance between the material and formal constraints. An experience that successfully invokes a sense of agency inhabits a “sweet spot” in design space. Trying to add additional formal constraints (more plot) or additional material constraints (more actions) to a balanced experience will likely move it out of the sweet spot.</p>
<h2>Relationship to Immersion and Transformation</h2>
<p>In the previous section, agency was taken as the fundamental Murray category to integrate with Aristotle. In this section, I examine what the new, integrated model has to say about immersion and transformation.</p>
<p><strong><span class="lightEmphasis">Immersion</span></strong></p>
<p>Murray suggests three ways of inducing immersion: structuring participation with a mask (an avatar), structuring participation as a visit, and making the interaction conventions (the interface mechanics) seamless. These three mechanisms can be viewed, in turn, as a way to provide material and formal constraints, as a design suggestion for balancing the constraints, or as a design suggestion for providing effective material constraints at the level of spectacle. Agency is a necessary condition for immersion.</p>
<p>An avatar can provide both material and formal constraints on a player’s actions. The avatar can provide character exposition through such traits as physical mannerisms and speech patterns. This character exposition helps the player to recapitulate the formal, plot constraints. Through both input and output filtering (e.g., the characters in Everquest, or Mateas 1997), the avatar can provide material constraints (affordances) for action.</p>
<p>A visit is one metaphor for balancing material and formal constraints when the material opportunities for action are limited. From the formal side, the conventions of a visit tell the player that they won’t be able to do much. Visits are about just looking around, possibly being guided through a space. Given the limited expectations for action communicated by the formal constraints, the designer can get away with (and in fact, must only) provide limited material means for action.</p>
<p>The mechanics provide the material resources for action at the level of spectacle (the interface can be considered part of the spectacle). Providing a clean, transparent interface insures that agency (and thus immersion) will not be disrupted.</p>
<p><strong><span class="lightEmphasis">Transformation</span></strong></p>
<p>Most of Murray’s discussion of transformation examines transformation as variety, particularly in the form of kaleidoscopic narratives that can be reentered multiple times so as to experience different aspects of the story. Agency, however, requires that a plot structure be present to provide formal constraints. An open-ended story without a clear point of view may disrupt the plot structure too much, thus disrupting agency. However, transformation as variety is necessary to make interaction really matter. If, every time a player enters the dramatic world, roughly the same story events occur regardless of the actions taken by the player, the player’s interaction will seem inconsequential; the player will actually have no real effect on the story.</p>
<p>One way to resolve the apparent conflict between transformation and agency is to note that agency is a first-person experience induced by making moment-by-moment decisions within a balanced (materially and formally) interactive system, while transformation as variety is a third-person experience induced by observing and reflecting on a number of interactive experiences. Imagine an interactive drama system that guides the player through a fixed plot. As the player interacts in the world, the system, through a number of clever and subtle devices, moves the fixed plot forward. Given that these devices are clever and subtle, the player never experiences them as coercive; the player is fully engaged in the story, forming intentions, acting on them, and experiencing agency. Imagine an observer who watches many players interact with this system. The observer notices that no matter what the players do, the same plot happens (meaning that roughly the same story events occur in the same order, leading to the same climax).</p>
<p>By watching many players interact with the system, the observer has begun to discern the devices that control the plot in the face of player interaction. This observer will conclude that the player has no true agency, that the player is not able to form any intentions within the dramatic world that actually matter. But the first-time player within the world is experiencing agency. The designer of the dramatic world could conclude – because they are designing the world for the player, not for the observer – that as long as the player experiences a true sense of interactive freedom (that is, agency) transformation as variety is not an important design consideration.</p>
<p>The problem with this solution to the agency vs. transformation dilemma becomes apparent as the player interacts with the world a second time. On subsequent replays of the world, the player and the observer become the same person. The total interactive experience consists of both first-person engagement within the dramatic world and third-person reflection across multiple experiences in the world. In order to support the total experience, the dramatic world must support both first-person engagement and third-person reflection; must provide agency and transformation as variety.</p>
<p>A dramatic world supporting this total experience could provide agency (and the concomitant need to have a plot structure providing formal constraints) <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> transformation by actively constructing the player experience such that each run-through of the story has a clean, unitary plot structure, but multiple run-throughs have different, unitary plot structures. Small changes in the player’s choices early on result in experiencing a different unfolding plot. The trick is to design the experience such that, once the end occurs, any particular run-through has the force of dramatic necessity.</p>
<p>The story should have the dramatic probabilities smoothly narrowing to a necessary end. Early choices may result in different necessary ends – later choices can have less effect on changing the whole story, since the set of dramatically probable events has already significantly narrowed. Change in the plot should not be traceable to distinct branch points; the player will not be offered an occasional small number of obvious choices that force the plot in a different direction. Rather, the plot should be smoothly mutable, varying in response to some global state that is itself a function of the many small actions performed by the player throughout the experience.</p>
<h2>The Type of Experience Informed by the Model</h2>
<p>This neo-Aristotelian poetics clarifies a specific conceptual experiment in the space of interactive stories. Specifically, the experiment consists of creating an interactive dramatic experience with the experiential properties of traditional drama, namely enactment, intensity, catharsis, unity, and closure. The Aristotelian analytic categories describe the structure (parts and relationships) of a story experience that induces these experiential properties. The way in which interaction has been incorporated into this model clarifies what is meant by interactive dramatic experience. Here, interaction means first-person interaction as a character within the story. Further, the essential experiential property of interactivity is taken to be agency. The interactive dramatic experience should be structured in such a way as to maximize the player’s sense of agency within the story. The model provides prescriptive structural guidance for maximizing agency, namely, to balance material and formal constraints. So the conceptual experiment informed by this model can be more precisely stated as follows: build a first-person, interactive dramatic world that, in addition to the classical experiential properties of Aristotelian drama, also provides the player with a strong sense of agency.</p>
<p><strong><span class="lightEmphasis">Technical Agenda</span></strong></p>
<p>In addition to clarifying conceptual and design issues in interactive drama, the neo-Aristotelian model informs a technical agenda of AI research necessary to enable this kind of experience.</p>
<p>The primary heuristic offered by the model is, again, that to maintain a sense of player agency in an interactive experience, material and formal constraints must be balanced. As the sophistication of the theme and plot of an experience increases, maintaining this balance will require characters whose motivations and desires are inferable from their actions. In addition, these characters will have to respond to the player’s actions. Believable agents, that is, computer-controlled characters with rich personalities and emotions, will be necessary. Additionally, in many cases (e.g., domestic dramas in which the plot centers around relationships, trust, betrayal, infidelity, and self-deception), language is necessary to communicate the plot.</p>
<p>In order to convey the formal constraints provided by the plot, the characters must have a rich repertoire of dialogue available. In addition, the player must be able to talk back. One can imagine a system in which the characters can engage in complex dialogue but the player can only select actions from menus or click on hotspots on the screen; this is, in fact, the strategy employed by character-based multimedia artwork and contemporary adventure games. But this strategy diminishes agency precisely by unbalancing material and formal constraints. The characters are able to express complex thoughts through language. However, the player is not able to influence their thoughts except at the coarse level provided by the mouse-click interactivity. Thus maximizing player agency requires providing at least a limited form of natural language dialogue.</p>
<p>The function of interactive characters is primarily to communicate material and formal constraints. That is, the player should be able to understand why characters take the actions they do, and how these actions relate to the plot. Sengers (this volume, 1998a) provides a nice analysis of how an audience-based focus on agents as communication requires changes in agent architectures. When the focus changes from “doing the right thing” (action selection) to “doing the thing right” (action expression), the technical research agenda changes (Sengers 1998b). The neo-Aristotelian model indicates that action expression is exactly what is needed. In addition, an interactive drama system must communicate dramatic probability (likely activity given the plot) while smoothly narrowing the space of dramatic probability over time. This means that story action must be coordinated in such a way as to communicate these plot-level constraints. Thus it is not enough for an individual character’s actions to be “readable” by an observer. Multiple characters must be coordinated in such a way that their joint activity communicates both formal and material (plot and character level) affordances. This requires a technical solution that blurs the firm plot/character distinction usually made in AI architectures for interactive drama (Blumberg and Galyean 1995; Weyhrauch 1997).</p>
<h2>Façade: An Interactive DramaGuided by the Model</h2>
<p>The author is currently engaged in a three-year collaboration with Andrew Stern to build Façade (Mateas and Stern 2000, Stern this volume), an interactive story world that seeks to carry out the conceptual and technical experiment informed by the neo-Aristotelian poetics. Together we will:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Create a compelling, well-written story that obeys dramatic principles, designed with many potential ways to play out.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Build artificial intelligence (AI) that can control the behavior of real-time-animated computer characters, to be used for performing the roles of all but one of the characters in the story.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Create a user interface that allows the player to move easily within the world, and converse and gesture with the computer characters.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Build AI that can understand a natural language and gestural input within the context of the story.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Build AI that can integrate the user’s interactions into the space of potential plot directions and character behaviors in the story.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Collaborate with voice actors and animators to author spoken dialogue, character behavior and story events within the engine, to construct the finished story world.</p>
<h2>Story Requirements</h2>
<p>The story requirements describe the properties we wish our story to have. These are not intended to be absolute requirements; that is, this is not a description of the properties that all interactive stories must have. Rather, these requirements are the set of assumptions grounding the design of the particular interactive story we intend to build.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Short One-Act Play</span>. Any one run of the scenario should take the player 15 to 20 minutes to complete. We focus on the short story for a couple of reasons. Building an interactive story has all the difficulties of writing and producing a noninteractive story (film or play) plus all the difficulty of supporting true player agency in the story. In exploring this new interactive art form it makes sense to first work with a distilled form of the problem, exploring scenarios with the minimum structure required to support dramatically interesting interaction. In addition, a short one-act play is an extreme, contrarian response to the many hours of gameplay celebrated in the design of contemporary computer games. Instead of providing the player with 40 to 60 hours of episodic action and endless wandering in a huge world, we want to design an experience that provides the player with 15 to 20 minutes of emotionally intense, tightly unified, dramatic action. The story should have the intensity, economy, and catharsis of traditional drama.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Relationships.</span> Rather than being about manipulating magical objects, fighting monsters, and rescuing princesses, the story should be about the emotional entanglements of human relationships. We are inter-ested in interactive experiences that appeal to the adult, non-computer-geek, movie-and-theater-going public.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Three Characters.</span> The story should have three characters, two controlled by the computer and one controlled by the player. Three is the minimum number of characters needed to support complex social interaction without placing the responsibility on the player to continually move the story forward. If the player is shy or confused about interacting, the two computer controlled characters can conspire to set up dramatic situations, all the while trying to get the player involved.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Player as Protagonist.</span> Ideally the player should experience the change in the protagonist as a personal journey. The player should be more than an “interactive observer,” not simply poking at the two computer-controlled characters to see how they change.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Embodied Interaction Matters.</span> Though dialogue should be a significant (perhaps the primary) mechanism for character interaction, it should not be the sole mechanism. Embodied interaction, such as moving from one location to another, picking up an object, or touching a character, should play a role in the action. These physical actions should carry emotional and symbolic weight, and should have a real influence on the characters and their evolving interaction. The physical representation of the characters and their environment should support action significant to the plot.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Action in a Single Location.</span> This provides unity of space and forces a focus on plot and character interaction.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Player’s Role not Over-constrained.</span> The amount of noninteractive exposition describing the player’s role should be minimal. The player should not have the feeling of playing a role, of actively having to think about how the character they are playing would react. Rather, the player should be able to be themselves as they explore the dramatic situation. Any role-related scripting of the interactor (Murray 1998) should occur as a natural by-product of their interaction in the world. The player should “ease into” their role; the role should be the “natural” way to act in the environment, given the dramatic situation.</p>
<h2>Story</h2>
<p>Our story, which satisfies these story requirements, is a domestic drama in which a married couple has invited the player over for dinner. (Assume for the moment that the player’s character is male.) Grace and Trip are apparently a model couple, socially and financial successful, well-liked by all. Grace and Trip both know the player from work. Trip and the player are friends; Grace and the player have gotten to know each other fairly recently. Shortly after arriving at their house for dinner, Grace confesses to the player that she has fallen in love with him. Throughout the rest of the evening, the player discovers that Grace and Trip’s marriage is actually falling apart. Their marriage has been sour for years; deep differences, buried frustrations, and unspoken infidelities have killed their love for each other. How the façade of their marriage cracks, what is revealed, and the final disposition of Grace and Trip’s marriage, and Grace and the player’s relationship, depends on the actions of the player. The story’s controlling idea: to be happy you must be true to yourself.</p>
<h2>Interface</h2>
<p>The story world is presented to the player as an animated, three-dimensional environment. The environment and characters within the environment are rendered in an illustrative style reminiscent of graphic novels. The player is able to move about this environment from a first-person point of view, gesture and pick up objects, and converse with the other characters by typing. The computer-controlled characters look directly out of the screen to gesture and talk to the player. The conversation discourse is real-time; that is, if the player is typing, it is as if they are speaking those words in (pseudo) real-time.</p>
<h2>Story Structure</h2>
<p>The story is structured as a classic Aristotelian plot arc. The AI plot system explicitly attempts to change dramatic values (e.g., the love between Trip and Grace, the trust between the player and Trip) in such a way as to make a well-formed plot arc happen. In the theory of (classical) dramatic writing, the smallest unit of value change is the beat (McKee 1997). Roughly, a beat consists of an action/reaction pair between characters. Beats are sequenced to make scenes, scenes to make acts, acts to make stories. The AI plot system contains a library of beats appropriate for our story. The system dynamically sequences beats in such a way as to respond to player activity and yet maintain a well-formed plot arc. For the player, each run-through of the story should have the force of dramatic necessity. Explicit decision points, which would highlight the nonlinearity of the story, should not be visible. However, in multiple run-throughs of the story, the player’s actions have a significant influence on what events occur in the plot, which are left out, and how the story ends. Only after playing the experience six or seven times should the player begin to feel they have “exhausted” the interactive story. In fact, full appreciation of the experience requires that the story be played multiple times. In Façade, our goal is to create an interactive story experience that provides the player with the agency to have an effect on the trajectory of the story, yet has the feel of a traditional, linear, dramatic experience.</p>
<h2>AI Architecture</h2>
<p>The architecture for Façade is informed by the neo-Aristotelian poetics of interactive drama, specifically by the technical agenda following from the poetics to:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Support the coordination of multiple characters’ actions to communicate material and formal affordances; that is, the coordination of multiple characters in carrying out dramatic action, and</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Support natural language dialogue so as to maintain player agency in an interactive story with a complex theme.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Again, the architectural basis for providing each of these capabilities is the smallest unit of dramatic value change, the beat.</p>
<h2>Beats</h2>
<p>In Façade, beats are architectural entities. A beat consists of: preconditions, a description of the values changed by the beat, success and failure conditions, and joint behaviors, to coordinate the characters in order to carry out the specific beat. Scenes have a similar structure, except that instead of having joint behaviors, a scene has a collection of beats it can use to try and make the scene happen. Preconditions and effects are used to first select a scene, and then, within the scene, beats. When a beat is selected, the joint behaviors associated with this beat are activated in the characters. These joint behaviors extend the reactive behaviors of Hap (Loyall and Bates 1991; Loyall 1997) to include explicit support for multi-agent (in our case, multicharacter) coordination in a manner similar to the STEAM architecture (Tambe 1997). As the player interacts within the beat, she will influence the specific performance of the beat. Because the beat is trying to cause specific value changes, it may turn out that there is no performance of the beat that believably incorporates player interaction while appropriately changing the values. In this case the beat is aborted and another beat is selected.</p>
<h2>Multicharacter Coordination</h2>
<p>Most approaches to computer-controlled characters have been driven by a notion of strong autonomy; that is, by the idea that the character independently chooses moment-by-moment what action to take next, based on local state (what has recently happened in the world). But interactive drama requires that character action make sense globally as well as locally; all of a character’s actions must “add up” to a consistent set of material and formal affordances, while still providing immediate response to player interaction. Rather than putting all the “character-ness” in the characters and all the “story-ness” in a drama manager, the architectural construct of the beat tightly binds character-specific and story-specific knowledge, just as character and plot are tightly related in the neo-Aristotelian poetics. Character behavior is now organized around the dramatic functions that the behavior serves, rather than organized around a conception of the character as independent of the dramatic action.</p>
<h2>Natural Language Dialogue</h2>
<p>Natural language understanding is a notoriously difficult AI problem; it is commonly agreed that building a system that is as good as a human being at participating in dialogue would be tantamount to modeling all of human intelligence. Thus, on first blush, our desire to have the player engage in unrestricted dialogue with the characters seems ludicrous. But here the fact that what we really want is dramatic dialogue within a specific story context comes to the rescue. The player’s dialogue and actions are additional material causes in the story (a contribution to the material out of which the story is being built), while the player’s intentions are additional formal causes in the story.</p>
<p>Of course these material and formal contributions must be consonant with the author-provided chains of material and formal causation. So for natural language understanding, we don’t need something that can glean the open-ended meaning out of arbitrary utterances, but rather something that interprets dialogue as contributions within a specific dramatic context. This is accomplished as follows: template rules map from surface text to a small number of discourse acts (things like “praise Grace,” or “praise Trip,” or “mention-topic marriage”). This is a many-to-few mapping, in which a huge number of surface productions get turned into a few discourse acts out of a small set of possible acts. Forward chaining rules then map the initial discourse acts to final discourse acts in a context-specific way. Discourse context is maintained by beats; the current active beat is the current active discourse context. Associated with beats are the beat-specific mapping rules that get added to the general rules when the beat is activated. When an utterance is not understood (no mapping rule is activated), recovery mechanisms try to mask the failure to understand while moving the story forward.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>In this essay, Murray’s concept of agency was integrated into Laurel’s Aristotelian structural model to yield a proposed Aristotelian interactive poetics. This model illuminates the general conditions under which a user will experience agency in any interactive experience and provides design and technology guidance for the particular case of building interactive dramatic experiences. The design of Façade, an interactive dramatic world being built by the author and Andrew Stern, is informed by this interactive poetics.</p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/salutory" class="internal">Gonzalo Frasca responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/unsmitten" class="internal">Brenda Laurel responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/bestyled" class="internal">Michael Mateas responds</a></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Aaarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>Aristotle (1997). <span class="booktitle">The Poetics</span>. Mineola, NY: Dover.</p>
<p>Avedon, Elliot M. and Brian Sutton-Smith (1971). <span class="booktitle">The Study of Games</span>. New York: Wiley.</p>
<p>Bates, J. (1992). “Virtual Reality, Art, and Entertainment.” <span class="journaltitle">Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments</span> 1, no.1 (1992): 133-138.</p>
<p>—., A.B. Loyall, and W.S. Reilly (1992). “Integrating Reactivity, Goals and Emotion in a Broad Agent.” Technical Report (CMU-CS-92-142), Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Blumberg, B. (1996). “Old Tricks, New Dogs: Ethology and Interactive Creatures.” Ph.D. Thesis, MIT Media Lab. Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>
<p>—., and T. Galyean (1995). “Multi-level Direction of Autonomous Creatures for Real-Time Virtual Environments.” In <span class="journaltitle">Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 95</span>, (1995): 47-54.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (July 2001). <a href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen" class="outbound">http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/</a>.</p>
<p>Frasca, Gonzalo (2001). “Ephemeral Games: Is it Barbaric to Design Videogames after Auschwitz?” In <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2001</span>, edited by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Jyväskylä: Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä. <a href="http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ephemeralFRASCA.pdf" class="outbound">http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ephemeralFRASCA.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>Hayes-Roth, B., R. van Gent, and D. Huber (1996). “Acting in Character.” In <span class="booktitle">Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors</span>, edited by R. Trappl and P. Petta. Berlin and New York: Springer. Also available as <span class="booktitle">Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Report KSL-96-13</span> (1996).</p>
<p>Kelso, M.T., P. Weyhrauch, and J. Bates (1999). “Dramatic Presence.” <span class="booktitle">Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual Environments</span> 2, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 1-15. <a href="http://www2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers/CMU-CS-92-195.ps" class="outbound">http://www2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/oz/web/papers/CMU-CS-92-195.ps</a>.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1986). “Towards the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.</p>
<p>—. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.</p>
<p>Loyall, A.B. (1997). “Believable Agents.” Ph.D. Thesis (Tech report CMU-CS-97-123), Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Loyall, A.B., and J. Bates (1991). “Hap: A Reactive, Adaptive Architecture for Agents.” Technical Report CMU-CS-91-147, Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Mateas, Michael (1997). “Computational Subjectivity in Virtual World Avatars.” In <span class="booktitle">Working Notes of the Socially Intelligent Agents Symposium, 1997 AAAI Fall Symposium Series</span>. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.</p>
<p>—. and Andrew Stern (2000). “Towards Integrating Plot and Character for Interactive Drama.” In <span class="booktitle">Working Notes of the Socially Intelligent Agents: Human in the Loop Symposium, 2000 AAAI Fall Symposium Series</span>. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.</p>
<p>McKee, Robert (1997). <span class="booktitle">Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting</span>. New York: Harper Collins.</p>
<p>Murray, Janet (1998). <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</p>
<p>Norman, Don (1988). <span class="booktitle">The Design of Everyday Things</span>. New York: Doubleday.</p>
<p>Sengers, Phoebe (1998a). “Anti-Boxology: Agent Design in Cultural Context.” Ph.D. Thesis (Technical Report CMU-CS-98-151), School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>—. (1998b). “Do the Thing Right: An Architecture for Action Expression.” In <span class="booktitle">Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents</span>, 24-31. May, 1998</p>
<p>Tambe, Milind. “Towards Flexible Teamwork.” <span class="booktitle">Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research</span> 7, (1997): 83-124.</p>
<p>Weyhrauch, P. (1997). “Guiding Interactive Drama.” Ph.D. Thesis (Technical Report CMU-CS-97-109), School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/aristotle">aristotle</a>, <a href="/tags/markku-eskelinen">Markku Eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/gonzalo-frasca">gonzalo frasca</a>, <a href="/tags/raine-koskimaa">raine koskimaa</a>, <a href="/tags/brenda-laurel">brenda laurel</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-mckee">robert mckee</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/don-norman">don norman</a>, <a href="/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="/tags/artificial-intelligence">artificial intelligence</a>, <a href="/tags/interactive-drama">interactive drama</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags/mud">MUD</a>, <a href="/tags/moo">MOO</a>, <a href="/tags/everquest">everquest</a>, <a href="/tags/ultima-online">ultima online</a>, <a href="/tags/sims">the sims</a>, <a href="/tags/will-wright">will wright</a>, <a href="/tags/agency">agency</a>, <a href="/tags/na">na</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator928 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/aristotelean#commentsBryan Loyall's response (excerpt)http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/compressed
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Bryan Loyall</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/autodramatic">From Game-Story to Cyberdrama</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Another criterion we have found important for interactive dramas is that they have compressed intensity. It is important that the story move at a reasonable pace and never get stuck. This is at odds with many games based on solving puzzles. If the participant can get stuck, then the story doesn’t progress, and the compressed intensity that is a hallmark of many traditional stories suffers.</p>
<p>Compressed intensity can be achieved by sharing the advancement of the story between the participant and the world. In a prototype interactive drama system, <span class="booktitle">The Penguin Who Wouldn’t Swim</span> (1999), the participant is a penguin who is trapped on a chunk of ice with two other penguins, drifting out to a dangerous sea:</p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/PenguinOne.gif" width="457" height="249" /></span></p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/PenguinTwo.gif" width="457" height="249" /></span></p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/PenguinThree.gif" width="457" height="249" /></span></p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/PenguinFour.gif" width="457" height="249" /></span></p>
<p> <span style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/PenguinFive.gif" width="457" height="249" /></span><br /><span class="caption">Fig. 1-5.: The Penguin Who Wouldn’t Swim. (Zoesis)</span></p>
<p>One of the penguins wants to stay, and the other wants to try to swim back to shore. The participant is always free to do as she wishes in the situation. To adjust the pacing, there is a dramatic guidance system that continuously estimates the participant’s subjective feeling of pacing. If that pacing is good, the system does nothing, leaving space for the participant’s actions. When the subjective pacing is bad, the system acts to advance or slow down the story as appropriate, using the characters and other active elements. (As this is going on, the dramatic guidance system is also acting to guide the flow of events toward the author’s story.)</p>
<p>All of these criteria are related to those of traditional stories and games, yet many are different in important ways needed for interactive drama. Murray urges us to not be limited by the dichotomy between stories and games, but rather to recombine and reinvent their primitive elements. In working to build these systems we have found that this is not just useful, but necessary. Interactive drama allows us to tell stories that we couldn’t tell before. It combines strengths and elements of stories and games, and is both and yet neither. If we are to reach the potential of expression that it offers, we must work directly in the new medium to explore, experiment and build.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="/thread/firstperson/artifactual" class="internal">Janet Murray responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/penguin-who-wouldnt-swim">the penguin who wouldn&#039;t swim</a>, <a href="/tags/interactive-drama">interactive drama</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags/dramatic">dramatic</a>, <a href="/tags/puzzles">puzzles</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator935 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/compressed#commentsAcademic Intenthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/transient
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Mark Barrett</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-06-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/expressive">Cyberdrama</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.</p>
<p>To be clear, I have no axe to grind with anyone who enjoys debating the merits of any subject, from sports franchises to music to movies, but as a creator those debates do not further my cause. I need to know how to make things, and that means I need practical solutions and reliable techniques to draw from. If that be bias, then I would say it is the bias of the surgeon who needs scalpel and sutures to save the patient.</p>
<p>It’s no secret that academic interest in the interactive industry has exploded over the past few years, but there is a wrench in the works. As an expressive art form interactivity is still in its infancy, and one of the core problems in the medium - interactive storytelling - has yet to be cracked. Over the past decade myriad failed commercial attempts have provided a number of important lessons, one of which is that the core competencies of the interactive entertainment industry are not particularly suited to solving this problem. This endemic failure necessarily led to a more theoretical analysis of how the problem might be solved, including research efforts at various academic institutions around the world. These academic research projects have in turn piqued the interest of academic critics in the medium, even though it is not yet fully formed.</p>
<p>Another more concrete lesson that can be taken from the failed interactive storytelling attempts in the commercial industry is that some things simply do not work. Many of these failed efforts were in fact valid approaches born of reasoned theory, which in turn helped define and describe the barriers we still face. Unfortunately, reading commentary from the academic world I sometimes get the feeling that these failed attempts are viewed more as serial stupidity than as the experiments I believe them to be. Like the NTSB reassembling and analyzing the scattered remains of a downed experimental aircraft, I believe analysis of failed commercial attempts at interactive storytelling can actually lead us to basic understandings about the theoretical limits of interactive storytelling itself, and I think the academic community is well-situated to begin that work.</p>
<p>I mention all this as preamble to my response to <a href="/thread/firstperson/autodramatic" class="internal">Janet Murray’s essay</a> in <em><strong><span class="booktitle">First Person</span></strong></em>. I have read Murray’s essay three times now, and as a creator I must report that I can find nothing in it that is of use to me. This is not a criticism of Murray’s rhetoric or of her essay, but a simple fact. Moreover, as someone who has been wrestling with the issue of interactive storytelling for close to a decade, I can say with certainty that many of the issues Murray raises have already been encountered in the commercial interactive entertainment industry. My concern with Murray’s article is that she does not reference this considerable history in her own discussion.</p>
<p>For example, Murray begins her essay by proposing and defining a new term (game-story), after which she proposes a number of new ways of defining the medium as it exists today, and may exist tomorrow. That we have no common language with which to discuss the craft of interactive design, and in particular interactive storytelling, has been a recurrent problem. Doug Church first attempted to advance the cause years ago by codifying a number of Formal Abstract Design Tools for commercial designers, but in the intervening years we have made little headway. Within the academic research community the problem is worse.</p>
<p>Exacerbating the problem is the fact that turnover in the interactive entertainment world is high, meaning that every few years an almost entirely new group encounters and attempts to address the same craft-language deficit, with little or no success. (I have seen this happen myself at least three times in the past ten years, and my fear is that the academic community - through essays like Murray’s - is now embarking on a fourth iteration.) Worse, significant problems can arise when new definitions ignore (or are oblivious of) practical lessons that have already been learned.</p>
<p>For example, here’s Murray at the end of her essay, talking about ‘agency’:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“But the more useful question is, how do we make a better cyberdrama? One criterion that I have found useful is the concept of dramatic agency. Agency is the term I used to distinguish the pleasure of interactivity, which arises from the two properties of the procedural and the participatory. When the world responds expressively and coherently to our engagement with it, then we experience agency. Agency requires that we script the interactor as well as the world, so that we build up the appropriate expectations.”</p>
<p>On the face of it I think I know what Murray is talking about here, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. If I’m just reading her essay to be able to kick a bit of theory around, that’s fine. But as a creator looking for techniques that I can use to deliver interactive storytelling, agency presents two problems. First, there’s the implicit claim that virtual worlds can respond “expressively and coherently” to user inputs in a dramatic context, which as a creator I know to be extremely difficult to achieve, and almost impossible to sustain. Second, there’s the imposed constraint that we must script the interactor, which runs contrary to the freedom of choice that most people view as the main benefit of interactivity.</p>
<p>My point here is that in order to define and promote new terms such as agency, we need to be clear about the concepts upon which those new terms are predicated. After a decade one would think that there might now be a universally recognized definition of what interactivity is, but there isn’t. My own states that interactivity is choice which determines outcome, but the very fact that I feel obligated to say `my own’ makes it clear that we have not collectively answered one of the most basic questions facing our medium.</p>
<p>Now, it is true in the academic world, and in particular in the realm of academic criticism, that many of these problems <span class="lightEmphasis">are</span> new. For that reason I certainly have no problem with Murray or anyone else attempting to codify the language of interactivity for the sake of analysis. If these efforts in turn lead to a more formal language that the industry itself can adopt, that’s all to the good. And it may in fact be that the academic industry’s inherent stability will provide an opportunity to establish the mature language of discourse that has so far evaded the more transient commercial industry.</p>
<p>What is not clear to me even now is whether that is the specific intent of Murray’s essay, or whether she really does mean to go beyond language to questions of craft and technique. If academics are going to be helpful in solving the interactive storytelling problem, they need to be explicit about their intent, exhaustive in their historical analysis and rigorous with their language. The danger in failing to do so is not simply that confusion will arise, but that academia will perpetuate the reinvention of the wheel among the transient student populations in the same way these issues have reappeared a number of times in the transient commercial industry. And from where I sit, as a creator, the last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="/thread/firstperson/expressive" class="internal">back to Cyberdrama introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/cyberdrama">cyberdrama</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/doug-church">doug church</a>, <a href="/tags/formal-abstract-design-tools">formal abstract design tools</a>, <a href="/tags/virtual-0">the virtual</a>, <a href="/tags/virtual-worlds">virtual worlds</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/ntsb">NTSB</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1076 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/transient#commentsNotes Toward a More Pervasive Cyberdramaturgyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/GPS
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jane McGonigal</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-06-28</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/expressive">Cyberdrama</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>What would cyberdrama look like <span class="lightEmphasis">off</span> the computer screen?</p>
<p>To put it another way: Could there be a more <span class="lightEmphasis">pervasive</span> cyberdramaturgy?</p>
<p>Computing is increasingly ubiquitous and mobile. Why shouldn’t cyberdrama be, as well? Imagine a set of scripting, design and production strategies that employed digital technologies but tended toward a more nomadic, embodied, and embedded aesthetic. What might we learn about the dramatic potential of cybernetic systems and new media – or about the cybernetic potential of modern drama – from performances developed along these more pervasive guidelines?</p>
<p>In their <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> contributions, <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/autodramatic">Janet Murray</a> and <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/aristotelean">Michael Mateas</a> outline a preliminary body of cyberdramatic works (<span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> and <span class="booktitle">Façade</span>, e.g.) that is decidedly un-pervasive. All of their examples play out entirely within a relatively local, limited, and fixed digital system – the typical desktop or laptop computer. Even when unbound to some degree by networking (<span class="booktitle">The Sims Online</span>, e.g.), the cyberdramas discussed by Murray and Mateas remain confined to a series of stable monitors, processors, and speakers. <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/formalist">Ken Perlin</a>, in his essay on the challenges of creating dramatically convincing interactive characters, likewise focuses on the computer itself as the primary stage of cyberdrama, positing digital characters or avatars as the primary actors. Identifying cyberdrama as “a visual narrative medium,” Perlin emphasizes the on-screen dramatic action above any user performance or off-screen action.</p>
<p>The user’s off-screen actions are not trivial in their respective conceptions of cyberdrama, of course. Noting the continuous user-system feedback loop, Murray calls cyberdrama an “improvised collaboration” between user and program/programmer. And Mateas wants the user’s intentions to be a “formal cause” in the dramatic chain. Perlin even seems to lament to some degree the importance of the user’s influence, noting: “All I have really experienced is <span class="lightEmphasis">my</span> agency,” as opposed to vicariously experiencing the characters’. But in the end, it seems to me quite clear that in the story-games presented as cyberdrama thus far, while the human user may get to script or direct to a substantial degree, the <span class="lightEmphasis">digital</span> collaborator and <span class="lightEmphasis">digital</span> causes are clearly doing the majority of the performing and dramatizing. That is to say, the story is processed digitally, the characters are represented digitally, and the dialogue is delivered digitally. In short, the actual dramatic action itself transpires digitally (in “the digital medium” and in “digital format”, as Murray puts it), even as it is guided or experienced by a human user.</p>
<p>The essential point I want to make here is that for Murray, Mateas, and Perlin the computer is seen as the <span class="lightEmphasis">medium itself</span> for drama. This makes perfect intuitive sense: It is precisely, after all, what makes their vision of cyberdrama `cyber’ – the medium of the drama <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> the computer, the drama itself <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span> digitally constructed, rendered and communicated. But I want to ask, from my own pervasive-leaning standpoint: What else might `cyber’ mean in a dramatic context, besides the use of cybernetic systems as a <span class="lightEmphasis">medium</span> for play and performance?</p>
<p>As I see it, the theorizing and development of cyberdrama has concentrated to date primarily on the following problem: how to <span class="lightEmphasis">transform computer systems</span> into sites for dramatic storytelling and theatrical play. I am interested, however, in adding a different transformational problem to the exploratory work of the cyberdramatic genre: using digital technologies, computer and otherwise, to transform <span class="lightEmphasis">everyday spaces</span> into sites for dramatic storytelling and theatrical play. In addition to making computer programs, games, and digital interfaces more dramatic, I would like to suggest, cyberdrama could make the <span class="lightEmphasis">world</span> more dramatic <span class="lightEmphasis">through</span> the computer programs, games, and interfaces that currently pervade it. Mateas refers to the field of story-games as “the <span class="lightEmphasis">space</span> of interactive narrative,” (emphasis mine) and I would like to take him perhaps more literally than he intended. Interactive narratives should have space, real-world space, in which the human “users” are doing as much embodied dramatizing and performing as the computer systems are, digitally, in current visions of cyberdrama.</p>
<p>This shift in transformational agenda, I believe, would significantly broaden the critical concerns of cyberdrama, as well as potentially sharpen its aesthetic edge. Currently, Murray and Mateas seek increased agency in drama, and Perlin hopes to develop tools for a more powerful emotional impact from digital content. But what else could digital technologies do for drama besides make it more meaningfully interactive, and what else could drama do for digital technologies than make it more effectively affective?</p>
<p>I, for one, would like to see modern drama become more <span class="lightEmphasis">active</span>, not just more <span class="lightEmphasis">inter</span> active. That is to say, I would like to users not only to be able to direct the outcome of the performance (the current interactive vision of cyberdrama) but also to <span class="lightEmphasis">be directed</span> in the performance as actors themselves (an active vision of cyberdrama). For instance, what if a story-game told the user what to do, instead of the other way around? Picture a user receiving GPS coordinates and a performance art mission over their cell phone; the successful completion (in character, of course) and digital documentation of said mission at the specified location would advance a larger dramatic narrative of some kind. In such a story-game, we might say that the cyberdrama is <span class="lightEmphasis">distributed</span>, twice over. First, dramatic responsibility is distributed to the user, and second, the dramatization is re-distributed to an online audience (or fellow players) through the digital documentation.</p>
<p>Pervasive cyberdrama also introduces the element of potential scalability to modern drama: Could cyberdrama produce the first <span class="lightEmphasis">massively</span> multi-actor theater? Scalability would work in two ways here: massively scaling the size of the cast and massively scaling the size of the audience. With 100,000 actors worldwide interpreting and performing the same script or mission, the live performance suddenly takes on the reach of broadcast technologies, a possibility unimaginable without new media and network technologies.</p>
<p>The flash mob phenomenon of the summer of 2003 is a perfect example of this kind of twice-distributed, massively-scalable performance. Flash mobs, of course, tended toward pure spectacle and therefore lacked the narrative aspect of cyberdrama. I can easily envision a story-game, however, in which flash mob-style spectacle were required, say, to attract the attention of a particular character or to unleash a narrative chain of events.</p>
<p>Two other genres of story-game that also are already engaged in cyberdrama very similar to what I am describing include <span class="lightEmphasis">urban superhero gaming</span> – <span class="booktitle">The Go Game</span> (Wink Back, Inc., 2001 - present) and <span class="booktitle">Uncle Roy All Around You</span> (Blast Theory and Mixed Reality Lab, 2003 - present), e.g. – and <span class="lightEmphasis">alternate reality gaming</span> – <span class="booktitle">The Beast</span> (Microsoft, 2001) and <span class="booktitle">Aware</span> (Real World Gaming, 2004 - present), e.g. Although the former tends to emphasize dramatic narrative less and the latter tends to feature more dramatic narrative than player performance, it is exciting and quite natural to imagine the two genres blending together to form a pervasive cyberdrama.</p>
<p>As for what a pervasive model of cyberdrama might do for cybertechnologies beyond imparting more affective power, I believe that public, spectacular deployment of the technologies would create opportunities for dialogue about their emerging ubiquity in our everyday lives and support public, critical awareness of new media and technologies in a highly accessible way. Here, I think of the Citywide Project and the Equator Project, groups that have for several years now argued for the importance of staging public, technological performances as a design research tactic. In short, cyberdrama could make digital media and computer technologies <span class="lightEmphasis">visible</span> in a way that has nothing to do with computer graphics.</p>
<p>In conclusion, I believe that the dramatic story-game can be performed not only on PCs or consoles, as Murray, Mateas and Perlin currently imagine it, but also through cell phones, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, Bluetooth mobile local area networking, and the Global Positioning System (to name a few pervasive platforms). These pervasive versions of cyberdrama, rather than deriving `cyber’-ness from choice of medium, emphasize the original meaning of the cybernetic root, considering drama primarily as an <span class="lightEmphasis">information system</span> requiring specific kinds of communication, control and feedback. As information technologies become more mobile and ubiquitous, so too can the information system of modern drama, an exciting prospect that would no doubt energize theater practice.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/expressive">back to Cyberdrama introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-mateas">michael mateas</a>, <a href="/tags/facade">facade</a>, <a href="/tags/sims">the sims</a>, <a href="/tags/ken-perlin">ken perlin</a>, <a href="/tags/go-game">the go game</a>, <a href="/tags/uncle-roy-all-around-you">uncle roy all around you</a>, <a href="/tags/beast">the beast</a>, <a href="/tags/aware">aware</a>, <a href="/tags/citywide-project">citywide project</a>, <a href="/tags/equator-project">equator project</a>, <a href="/tags/rfid">RFID</a>, <a href="/tags/bluetooth">bluetooth</a>, <a href="/tags/gps">GPS</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags/theater">theater</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1071 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comVideogames of the Oppressedhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/Boalian
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Gonzalo Frasca</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-06-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Is it possible to design videogames that deal with social and political issues? Could videogames be used as a tool for encouraging critical thinking? Do videogames offer an alternative way of understanding reality? Although videogames are now about three decades old, these questions remain unanswered. It seems that even if the medium has reached incredible popularity, it is still far away from becoming a mature communication form that could deal with such things as human relationships, or political and social issues. Or maybe it can never become such thing. After all, as many may say, these are simply games and games have been considered trivial entertainment for ages. Nevertheless, I claim that videogames could indeed deal with human relationships and social issues, while encouraging critical thinking. In this essay, I explore the possibilities of non-Aristotelian game design, mainly based on the work of drama theorist Augusto Boal.</p>
<h2>Simulation and Representation</h2>
<p>The design of consciousness-raising videogames is not as simple as replacing Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi with Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Brenda Laurel’s now-classic <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theater</span> (1991), computer software and videogames can be understood through the same rules that Aristotle described in his <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>. The “interactive drama/storytelling/narrative” paradigm has been the leading design guide in most current videogame design, supported both by such theorists as Laurel and Janet Murray (Murray 1997) and by the videogame industry. It seems that the current tendency is to explain the computer (and videogames) as an extension of a previously existent medium: Laurel did it with drama, Murray with storytelling and, more recently, Lev Manovich (Manovich 2001) based his approach on film studies. The main advantage of these perspectives is that they depict the similitude between so-called “new” and “old” media.</p>
<p>It would be extremely naïve to think that videogames are a brand new cultural manifestation that does not draw upon any previous tradition. However, even if it sounds obvious, videogames are, before anything else, games. Sadly, good formal research on games is scarce. It seems that it is easier to use already popular theories rather than exploring the field from a fresh perspective. If we want to understand videogames, we first need to understand games. We need a <span class="lightEmphasis">ludology</span> (Frasca, 1999), a formal discipline that focuses on games, both traditional and electronic.</p>
<p>If videogames are not narratives, what are they? I am not denying that games and narrative do share many elements, but as Espen Aarseth argues (Aarseth 1997), it is necessary to study games through a cybernetic approach. Unlike narrative, which is constituted by a fixed series of actions and descriptions, videogames need the active participation of the user not just for interpretational matters, but also for accessing its content. Narrative is based on semiotic representation, while videogames also rely on simulation, <cite id="note_1">I am often criticized for using the term “simulation” in a very broad sense, particularly by colleagues with a computer science background. Traditionally, simulations model real systems and connote an intention of scientific understanding. When I use the term it is in order to describe a different form of representation and, as in modern semiotics, I do not see the need for a real referent. Just as the word “unicorn” lacks a real referent, I say that <span class="booktitle">Mario Brothers</span> simulates an imaginary dynamic system (the Mario world).</cite> understood as the modeling of a dynamic system through another system. A narrative film about a dog gives us information about the dog itself (description) and the sequence of events that this particular dog endured (action). A virtual pet, such as a <span class="foreignWord">Tamagotchi</span>, is not about description or action, but rather about how it conducts itself in relationship with the player and the environment (behavior). In temporal terms, narrative is about what already happened while simulation is about what could happen.</p>
<p>Because of its static essence, narrative has been used by our culture to make statements. We explain, understand and deal with reality through narrative. Our religious and moral values have been historically shaped in this way through different sacred books (<span class="booktitle">Bible</span>, <span class="booktitle">Koran</span>, <span class="booktitle">Popol Vuh</span>). Although the interpretation of sacred texts has always been open, the written words and the stories themselves have mainly remained fixed. On the other hand, simulation is dynamic and its essence is change: it produces different outcomes. This makes simulations not such a good choice for sacred moral codes since you may not want to have your holy scripts alternately read, “Thou shall not kill,” and “Thou shall kill.” This also explains why videogames are not a good realm for historic events or characters or for making moral statements. A videogame about Anne Frank would be perceived as immoral, since the fact that she could survive or die depending on the player’s performance would trivialize the value of human life. We all know that Anne Frank died and the reasons for her death; her story serves to convey a particular set of values.</p>
<p>The potential of simulation is not as a conveyor of values, but as a way to explore the mechanics of dynamic systems. <span class="booktitle">SimCity</span> <sup>TM</sup>, Will Wright’s urban simulator, is not about Paris or Rome, but about potential cities. Of course, it is possible to learn a lot about a big city such as Paris – or any other – through <span class="booktitle">SimCity</span>, but that kind of knowledge is different from what we can read in a Hemingway or Balzac book. It would be possible to create a model of Paris in <span class="booktitle">SimCity</span> and use it for experimentation: “What would happen if I removed the Seine River? What if I built narrow streets rather than large avenues?” Novels usually take a concrete set of characters, in a particular setting, enduring a particular set of events. Simulations also have particularities and referents, but their main characteristic is that they allow tweaking and changing the original model. Certainly, a reader can extrapolate the characteristics of the characters and settings of a novel to model its ideological rules. Although this is an exception in narrative reserved for sophisticated readers, it is a requirement in simulations. Simulation is an ideal medium for exposing rules rather than particular events.</p>
<h2>Resurfacing from Immersion</h2>
<p>Laurel’s approach to software design and part of Murray’s – particularly her concept of immersion as one of the three key providers of pleasure in interactive environments – are heavily influenced by Aristotelian poetics. The fact is that, while Aristotle’s ideas are definitively popular in our culture, other approaches exist. One of the biggest problems of Aristotelian poetics, as explained by such theorists as Bertolt Brecht, is that spectators get immersed in the stories and lose their critical distance from what is happening on the stage or screen. Of course, this effect is seen as narcotic only by authors whose intentions go further than simple entertainment and want to trigger critical thinking in their audience – for educational, social, and/or political reasons. The current tendency of the videogame industry is definitively Aristotelian: immersion needs to be increased by creating more realistic graphics and sounds. In <span class="booktitle">Life on the Screen</span> (1995), a brilliant study in how people deal with computers and simulations, Sherry Turkle envisioned the possibility of using simulations for players to analyze and question their ideological assumptions:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">But one can imagine a third response. This would take the cultural pervasiveness of simulation as a challenge to develop a more sophisticated social criticism. This new criticism would not lump all simulations together, but would discriminate among them. It would take as its goal the development of simulations that actually help players challenge the model’s built-in assumptions. This new criticism would try to use simulation as a means of consciousness-raising. (71)</p>
<p>These alternative simulations imagined by Turkle are not yet available on the computer. Interestingly, they are available somewhere else. For more than three decades, Brazilian playwright and drama theorist Augusto Boal has developed the “Theater of the Oppressed,” an original form of theater that combines theater and simulation in order to produce social and political simulations. He built his techniques based on the Marxist theater tradition developed by Bertolt Brecht, as well as on Paulo Freire’s <span class="booktitle">Pedagogy of the Oppressed</span> (1970).</p>
<p>Bertolt Brecht’s drama challenged Aristotle’s ideas; as mentioned previously, he argued that Aristotelian theater keeps the audience immersed without giving them a chance to take a step back and critically think about what is happening on the stage. Brecht created several techniques in order to alienate what is familiar in the play, constantly reminding the spectators that they were experiencing a representation and stimulating them to think about what they were watching. Brecht’s techniques, however, were not exclusively targeted at the audience. He also encouraged performers to be completely aware of their actions. Instead of being “inside the skin” of the character, he encouraged having a critical distance that would let them understand their role.</p>
<p>Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal (1971) took Brecht’s ideas even further by creating a set of techniques, known as the “Theater of the Oppressed” (TO), that tear down the stage’s “fourth wall.” Boal’s main goal is to foster critical thinking and break the actor/spectator dichotomy by creating the “spect-actor,” a new category that integrates both by giving them active participation in the play. The repertoire of techniques of TO is extremely large and includes, among others, the “invisible theater” – where actors work “undercover” in public spaces – and the “Forum Theater.”</p>
<p>Forums are created around a short play (five to 10 minutes long), usually scripted on-site, and based on the suggestions of the participants. The scene always enacts an oppressive situation, where the protagonist has to deal with powerful characters that do not let her achieve her goals. For example, the play could be about a housewife whose husband forbids her to go out with her friends. The scene is enacted without showing a solution to the problem. After one representation, anybody in the audience can take over the role of the protagonist and suggest, through her acting, a solution that she thinks would break the oppression. Since the problems are complex, the solutions are generally incomplete. This is why the process is repeated several times, always offering a new perspective on the subject. In Boal’s (1992) own words: “It is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution.” It is central to stress that Boal uses theater as a tool, not as a goal per se. In other words, the ultimate objective of Forum Theater plays is not to produce beautiful or enjoyable performances, but rather to promote critical discussions among the participants. Unlike traditional theater that offers just one complete, closed sequence of actions, Forum Theater sessions show multiple perspectives on a particular problem. They do not show “what happened” but rather “what could happen.” It is a theater that stresses the possibility of change, at both social and personal levels.</p>
<p>For these reasons, TO is a perfect model for creating non-Aristotelian, nonimmersive videogames. Earlier in this essay, I criticized other authors that explain games through narrative and theater, and here I am proposing a drama model for videogames! However, while Boal certainly uses theater techniques, his work is closer to games and simulation than to theater. As performance theorist Philip Auslander argues, Boal had to give up performance altogether in order to bridge the gap between performers and spectators (Auslander, 1999). Forum Theater is nothing but a game, with specific rules, that uses theater to simulate certain events and behaviors. Without a single line of computer code, Boal created a Third World, non-Aristotelian version of the Holodeck. And the best thing about it is that it actually works.</p>
<h2>The Search for a Social and Political Logo</h2>
<p>Certainly, the idea of using simulation and videogames for educational purposes is far from new and was already extensively explored by constructionism. The idea was developed by Seymour Papert through <span class="booktitle">Mindstorms</span> (1985) and <span class="booktitle">Logo</span>, and it was continued by such authors as Yasmin Kafai (Kafai 1995), whose students learned mathematics through videogame design. The main problem with constructionism is that it was not designed for dealing with social and humanities education. This can be easily explained by many factors, including Papert’s own background as a mathematician and the election of the computer as their main tool. Certainly, Kafai’s students had to research Greek mythology to create their videogames, but this was mainly a side effect, because their focus was on mathematics. In fact constructionism’s main success stories are in the field of science education, and it does not seem to be the ideal environment for critically discussing human and social matters.</p>
<p>Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was developed about the same time as constructionism. In fact, they share many characteristics. However, Freire had different goals (mainly adult literacy and the development of critical attitudes towards reality in order to attain social change) and settings (the Brazilian <span class="foreignWord">Nordeste</span>, one of the poorest places of the world). Unlike constructionism, his pedagogy offers great tools for critical discussion and social awareness – but it is not as well suited for science education.</p>
<p>What I am proposing here is to use Boalian techniques to develop a complementary approach to constructionism that would allow the use of videogames as tools for education and sociopolitical awareness. To create a simile with Logo, I argue that we need an engaged, political Logo. We need an environment that engages children in questioning the ideological assumptions of videogames. We need a political microworld where it would matter if the turtle turns left or right. In the next sections, I introduce two examples on how Boalian techniques could be brought to the computer. Please note that both systems are hypothetical and serve only as an illustration of the potential of non-Aristotelian videogames.</p>
<h2>Forum Videogames</h2>
<p>The following technique is a computer-based equivalent of Boal’s Forum Theater that uses videogame rather than drama. Instead of performing on a stage, participants would discuss real-life situations by creating videogames and then modifying them in order to reflect their personal points of view.</p>
<p>Forum Videogames could work as a feature available inside a bigger “Videogames of the Oppressed” online community. It would be targeted to a homogenous small group – for example, a class of high school teenagers – coordinated by a moderator. Any participant – who will be referred as the “protagonist” – would be able to start a forum. The protagonist would be able to design one or a series of videogames where she would try to simulate a problematic situation that she is trying to deal with. The process of videogame design would be done by modifying preexistent templates based on classic videogames (<span class="booktitle">Space Invaders</span>, <span class="booktitle">Street Fighter</span>, <span class="booktitle">Pac-Man</span>, etc).</p>
<p>Once the game is ready, the protagonist would post it online, allowing the rest of the group to play with it. Players would be able to post their written comments and even submit a modified version of the game that reflects their personal position towards the protagonist’s problem. The modified version could be a variant of the protagonist’s original game, or a brand new game based on a different template. The process would repeat many times, just as it happens in Forum Theater, triggering new designs and discussions.</p>
<p>For example, let’s imagine that the protagonist’s problem is that he is being bullied at school and he doesn’t know how to deal with this. In order to simulate his problem, he could use a <span class="booktitle">Pac-Man</span> template and modify the original game. He would replace the <span class="booktitle">Pac-Man</span> with a cartoon version of himself and replace the ghosts with images of his harassers. In addition to this, he could also take away the score feature and the pills, leaving nothing but a labyrinth where he is being constantly chased. Once that game is posted online, the other members of the group could respond by creating variants. One of them could be to modify the structure of the labyrinth to create a small space where the protagonist could live isolated, safe from the bullies. But other players could say that this means giving up his freedom and, therefore, that it is not a good solution. Then, another player could suggest using violence, by introducing weapons on the environment. Another may suggest introducing more players (several Pac-Mans) who would stick together and defend themselves as a group of virtual vigilantes. Of course, somebody may argue that it is technically impossible to be all the time surrounded by your friends: the bullies will find you alone sooner or later.</p>
<p>Again, the goal of these games is not to find appropriate solutions, but rather serve to trigger discussions – which could take place in person or through online chat. It would not matter if the games could not simulate the situation with realistic accuracy. Instead, these games would work as metonyms that could guide discussions and serve to explore alternative ways of dealing with real life issues.</p>
<h2>Simulating Characters in <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span></h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> represents a breakthrough in videogame design. For the first time, a best-selling game is not about trolls and wizards. This simulation is about regular people – known as Sims – in everyday situations in an American, suburban environment.</p>
<p>In my opinion, <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> ‘s biggest achievement was that it fully opened the Pandora’s box of simulating human life. Although structurally <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is similar to other resource management simulations, the fact that it portrays people, and not aliens, results in players asking questions about the game’s ideology. Is it okay to let a Sim starve to death? Is it possible to have same-sex Sims relationships? What about threesomes? Will I spoil my Sim child if I buy her too many toys? All these questions would have probably never been asked if the game had been about monsters or aliens. The fact that the best-selling game of the year 2000 was about people is a clear sign that videogames are on their way towards maturity.</p>
<p>For ages, our civilization has been learning to deal with the issues of representation, including concerns about its accuracy and its limits. Videogames like <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> are introducing to the masses a different form of representation – simulation – which has always been present in our culture through games, but that now can dare to start modeling more complex systems, such as human life. Even if <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> is a very limited model of human relationships, it is a harbinger of videogames as a mature communicational and artistic form.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> ‘s constraints are many. For example, Sims cannot communicate in a verbal language and their personal relationships are not described with depth. In addition, the consumerist ideology that drives the simulation is nothing short of disturbing: the amount of friends that you have literally depends on the number of goods that you own and the size of your house. Nevertheless, simulation is an extremely complex task and, despite its shortcomings, <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> succeeds at delivering an enjoyable game involving human characters.</p>
<p>The game allows players to create their own skins and designs and then share them online. However, the designers did not create an open environment where players could modify the rules of the simulation by coding new behaviors and objects. This is understandable from a marketing perspective: software companies want both to retain authorial control over their productions and to prevent players from creating controversial materials.</p>
<p>What follows is a description of how a hypothetical, open-source, modified version of <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> could serve as an environment for players to distance themselves from the representation and engage in critical discussions. My intention is to show that Boal’s ideas could also be used in mainstream videogame design. Although my previous example was better suited for small groups, educational or therapeutic environments, this one could appeal to a larger community of players.</p>
<p>In traditional videogames, the player “is” the character. In <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> the player can control the character in a less direct way. However, <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> ‘s characters are generally flat, because most of their differences are based either on their moods, or on visual traits that do not affect their behavior. This would be solved if players had more control over character creation by deciding their behavioral rules instead of just selecting their clothes. In order to encourage critical debate, the modified version of <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span> that I propose would allow players to modify the internal rules of the characters. The basic gameplay would be similar to the current game but, in addition to downloadable objects and skins, it would also be possible to get user-designed characters with different personalities and particular sets of actions. These characters would be created with a special tool that would require programming. Players would be able to rate the different characters and even create their own versions, based on behavioral details that they think need improvement in order to attain a higher level of realism. Both behaviors and comments would be available online in a “Character Exchange” site.</p>
<h2>A Sample Scenario</h2>
<p>The following is a sample scenario of a particular session, based on the rules that I am proposing:</p>
<p>Agnes has been playing with the simulation for many days. She knows its basic dynamics and enjoys it. Nevertheless, she feels that it would be better if family relationships were more realistic. So, she goes to the “Character Exchange” web site and browses through different characters. She finds one that looks interesting. It is called “Dave’s Alcoholic Mother version 0.9,” and it has the following description:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">This mother spends a lot of time working, and she is very tired when she gets back home. Still, every night she has to fix dinner and do some housecleaning. She can get very annoyed by children and pets and may become violent. In order to escape from her reality, she drinks a lot of bourbon.</p>
<p>Agnes considers giving it a try and downloads it into one of the houses with which she has been playing. Agnes’s virtual household is composed of a couple, three children, and a cat. After the download, her original mother character is replaced by “Dave’s Alcoholic Mother version 0.9.” Agnes finds the character quite interesting. After playing with it for a while, she realizes that when the mother reaches a certain degree of fatigue, she starts drinking. The more she drinks, the less she will care about her family. She remains calm unless her husband insists on cuddling or giving her a back rub.</p>
<p>Although Agnes thinks that the character is pretty well-depicted, there are details that she does not agree with. For example, the character always gets her drinks from the little bar in the living room. Agnes knows from personal experience that, in general, alcoholics hide their bottles around the house and try not to drink in public. So, she goes back to the “Character Exchange” and writes a public critique of Dave’s creation. After doing this, she tries alternative alcoholic-mother behaviors. If the available characters do not satisfy her, she can modify one of the available versions and introduce a new behavior that makes the mother hide her alcohol bottles. She can then post this new character online and make it available to other players.</p>
<p>Some weeks later, Agnes gets a little tired of playing with her character and wants to give her some more personality. So, she decides that it would be great if she could add some extra behavioral code to it. Agnes downloads a character described as “Peter’s Radical Greenpeace Activist version 9.1.” After some editing and modifications, Agnes introduces this behavior to her alcoholic-mother character. The new character would still be an alcoholic, but she would take more care of plants, recycle everything and would never kick her cat while drunk.</p>
<h2>The Problems of Simulation Building</h2>
<p>As I previously said, the biggest obstacle for building Boalian videogames lies in the fact that programming simulated behaviors is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. Even with a design tool that involved templates or some kind of visual object-oriented programming, it is likely that the average player would consider the task overwhelming. Still, as Amy Bruckman’s (1998) work on <span class="booktitle">MOOSE Crossing</span> – an object-oriented, multi-user dungeon where participants can modify the environment by creating new objects – suggests, players can become really involved with programming simulated features and will exchange tips and help with others who are less skilled programmers.</p>
<p>Although it is possible that certain players could deal with the programming of new behaviors, it is likely that most participants would only be able to download behaviors made by others. I think that even if most players would not be able to code their own features, they could at least tinker with preexisting behaviors. The fact that a single behavior such as alcoholism could be available in so many different versions from players from different social and cultural backgrounds would encourage players to think about issues such as social construction of reality – but also about defending their points of view and listening to alternative opinions.</p>
<p>Of course, the lack of programming proficiency is not the only problem that Boalian videogame designers would face. However, the popularity of simulators such as The Sims or SimCity may serve as a tool for transforming the perception of videogames from interactive narratives into simulated models. As the public becomes more familiar with manipulating and modifying simulations, the concept of designing their own may become more appealing.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: Videogames of Tolerance</h2>
<p>The two examples that I just gave should be considered more as illustrations of the paths that could be taken in order to design Boalian videogames than as blueprints for actual systems. The main goal of these examples is to show that videogames could be used as tools for better understanding reality and raising critical awareness among players. Current Aristotelian videogame design paradigms such as immersion should not be taken for granted, since questioning the values and mechanics of videogames could also be a source of engagement for players.</p>
<p>The main problem with these examples is that they require players to be very good programmers, a prerequisite that might be impossible to attain. Nevertheless, there may be some possible solutions to this problem. Further details on these techniques can be found in “Videogames of the Oppressed,” a thesis (Frasca 2001) developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology and on which this article is based (available at <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ludology.org">www.ludology.org</a>).</p>
<p>When I describe these ideas to fellow researchers or game designers, they usually ask me if I really believe that social and personal change is possible through videogames. My answer is always a straight “no.” Neither art not games can change reality, but I do believe that they can encourage people to question it and to envision possible changes.</p>
<p>Unlike narrative, simulations are a kaleidoscopic form of representation that can provide us with multiple and alternative points of view. By accepting this paradigm, players can realize that there are many possible ways to deal with their personal and social reality. Hopefully, this might lead to the development of a tolerant attitude that accepts multiplicity as the rule and not the exception.</p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/machinima">Eric Zimmerman responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/comiket">Mizuko Ito responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/mod">Gonzalo Frasca responds</a></p>
<h2>References: Literature</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1997.</p>
<p>Aristotle. <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span> (1967). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.</p>
<p>Auslander, Philip (1999). “Boal, Blau, Brecht: the Body.” In <span class="booktitle">Playing Boal</span>, edited by Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz. London: Routledge.</p>
<p>Boal, Augusto (1992). <span class="booktitle">Games for Actors and Non-Actors</span>. London: Routledge.</p>
<p>—. (1985). <span class="booktitle">Theatre of the Oppressed</span>. New York: TCG.</p>
<p>Bruckman, Amy (1998). “Community Support for Constructionist Learning.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/papers/cscw.html">http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/papers/cscw.html</a>.</p>
<p>Ellington, Henry, Eric Addinal, and Fred Percival (1982). <span class="booktitle">A Handbook of Game Design</span>. London: Kogan Page Limited.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (July 2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen/">http://cmc.uib.no/gamestudies/0101/eskelinen/</a></p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku, and Raine Koskimaa, editors (2001). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2000</span>. Saarijärvi: Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, University of Jyväskylä.</p>
<p>Frasca, Gonzalo (1998). “Don’t play it again, Sam: One-session games of Narration.” <a class="outbound" href="http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/papers/frasca.html">http://cmc.uib.no/dac98/papers/frasca.html</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001). “Videogames of the Oppressed.” M.A. Thesis: School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/thesis/">http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/thesis/</a>.</p>
<p>—. (1999). “Narratology meets Ludology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)games and Narrative.” <span class="booktitle">Parnasso</span> 3: 365-371. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm">http://www.jacaranda.org/frasca/ludology.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Freire, Paulo (2000). <span class="booktitle">Pedagogy of the Oppressed</span>. New York: Continuum.</p>
<p>Jenkins, Henry (1992). <span class="booktitle">Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Paricipatory Culture</span>. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Kafai, Yasmin (1995). <span class="booktitle">Minds in Play: Computer Game Design as a Context for Children’s Learning</span>. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (1991). <span class="booktitle">Computers as Theatre</span>. London: Addison Wesley.</p>
<p>Manovich, Lev (2001). <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Murray, Janet (1997). <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span>. New York: Free Press.</p>
<p>Papert, Seymour (1985). <span class="booktitle">Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas</span>. New York: Basic Books.</p>
<p>Penley, Constance (1991). “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology.” In <span class="booktitle">Technoculture, edited by Constance Penley and Alex Ross</span>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.</p>
<p>Spiegelman, Art (1993). <span class="booktitle">Maus: A Survivor’s Tale</span>. New York: Pantheon Books.</p>
<p>Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins (1995). <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek</span>. New York: Routledge, 1995.</p>
<p>Turkle, Sherry (1995). <span class="booktitle">Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet</span>. New York: Simon and Schuster.</p>
<p>Willet, John, editor (1995). <span class="booktitle">Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic</span>. New York: Hill and Wang.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>. Will Wright; Electronic Arts. 2000. <a class="outbound" href="http://thesims.ea.com">http://thesims.ea.com</a>.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">SimCity 2000</span>. Will Wright; Electronic Arts. 1995.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/videogames">videogames</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/aristotle">aristotle</a>, <a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a>, <a href="/tags/drama">drama</a>, <a href="/tags/augusto-boal">augusto boal</a>, <a href="/tags/nintendo">nintendo</a>, <a href="/tags/sacco-and-vanzetti">sacco and vanzetti</a>, <a href="/tags/brenda-laurel">brenda laurel</a>, <a href="/tags/computers-theater">computers as theater</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/hamlet-holodeck">hamlet on the holodeck</a>, <a href="/tags/lev-manovich">lev manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/ludology">ludology</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/tamagotchi">tamagotchi</a>, <a href="/tags/bible-0">bible</a>, <a href="/tags/koran">koran</a>, <a href="/tags/popol-vuh">popol vuh</a>, <a href="/tags/anne-frank">anne frank</a>, <a href="/tags/simc">simc</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator987 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comCelia Pearce responds in turnhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/metric
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Celia Pearce</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-11</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/tamagotchi">Towards a Game Theory of Game</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The plethora of literary references in Mark Bernstein’s remarks merely calls attention to my point that games are not literature, and as such, should not be measured by the same metrics. His closing notion that a game should “bring us new understanding of sexuality” or “[tell] us about surviving the moment we learn that our father… is not the man we once believed” reveal the fundamental problem with using the tools of literary criticism as a means of measuring the effectiveness of games. The function of a game is not to “tell” us anything, and that is perhaps the great schism between literature and games. Granted, the reader must interpret and construct the narrative in literature, but they cannot <span class="lightEmphasis">change</span> or <span class="lightEmphasis">control</span> the narrative in any way; in literature, the narrative is not <span class="lightEmphasis">theirs</span> but the author’s. Games do not ask the player to construct or interpret what the author is trying to “tell” them. Rather they function as a kit of parts that allows the player to construct their own story or variation thereof. Bernstein’s points about abstraction in literature are well-taken, but I still contend that the <span class="lightEmphasis">role</span> of abstraction is different in these two media. They are alike in that they invite reader/player projection, but they differ in that in games, the <span class="lightEmphasis">formation</span> of character is the largely the domain of the player. Thus the player does not merely empathize with the characters, but ultimately has the power to <span class="lightEmphasis">influence</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">change</span> them. Regarding Bernstein’s final question, I think it is as futile to ask games to serve the same function as literature as it is to ask music to serve the same function as poetry. And implicit in the question is the gleeful triumph with which literary theorists maintain that, “see, games will never be as good as literature.” But in fact, games are not the same thing as literature, and should be appreciated for what they are, not what they are not.</p>
<p>Mary Flanagan’s comments provide an interesting counterpoint to Bernstein’s. She points out, and rightly so, that it can be useful to draw from other critical disciplines in looking at games. I think a number of theorists have done this to great effect. Janet Murray is perhaps the best example of a theorist who has taken ideas from literary theory and transformed them into a relevant game-centric critique. Flanagan obliquely criticizes the implied isolationism of the game-centric theory of game that I propose, and in one sense, she is right. But it is important to realize that to a certain extent, games have evolved in isolation from other media. The practice of using critical theory tools from literature and film to discuss games is a fairly recent phenomenon. Indeed it has really been the mainstreaming of the computer game that has caused these other disciplines to sit up and take notice. In spite of the enormous role of games in popular culture, the vast majority of critical theorists from these disciplines still take the more typical stance of regarding games with either disdain or indifference. Nonetheless, it has become trendy in some circles to throw literary theory at games to “see if it sticks.” Most of the time, this form of theoretical colonialism only serves the purpose of proving the artistic inadequacy of games-as-literature, which is not very useful to anyone. It is equivalent to the Western practice of interpreting other cultures as “primitive” or “backward” compared to European culture, rather than evaluating them on their own terms. So although I agree that it is useful to draw from many discourses, as an “indigenous” game person (i.e. someone who has not come out of another discipline), I will continue to argue that games warrant the further development of an indigenous theory, though not necessarily an isolationist one. In the same way indigenous cultures can benefit by incorporating tools from other cultures into existing cultural paradigms, I think game theory can benefit from other critical tools. However, I still believe that the core theory needs to arise from the unique properties of games themselves in order to develop an approach that is both appropriate and useful.</p>
<p style="text-align:center"><span class="lightEmphasis">GAME OVER</span></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/introductory">back to Game Theories introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/mark-bernstein">mark bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-flanagan">mary flanagan</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/computer-games">computer games</a>, <a href="/tags/computer-game-studies">computer game studies</a>, <a href="/tags/game-design">game design</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/literary-theory">literary theory</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator981 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comMoulthrop responds in turnhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/cyberpragmatic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stuart Moulthrop</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-22</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/molecular">From Work to Play</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The editors of <span class="booktitle">First Person</span> have cleverly tested a tenet which I and others hold quite closely: namely that the clearest understanding of new media forms must go beyond theory to include significant practical engagement. It is thus gratifying, not to mention chastening, to receive responses from two of the most accomplished practitioner/theorists I know, John Cayley and Diane Gromala. In the essay I point to an American (i.e. U.S.) cybernetic pragmatism. Cayley and Gromala represent a larger, international digital culture whose insights are similarly grounded in the experience of making and doing – and with whom I have, admittedly, fewer ideological bones to pick than I do with the native strain.</p>
<p>This is not to say, however, that my respondents have failed in their critical duties. Both complain with some justification about the characteristic lack of subtlety in my polemic. Cayley worries that my provocative title sets up an absolute division between its two terms: “I think we have to play more on the ambiguities of `play’ here,” he writes, and goes on to argue for “transitional cultural objects” occupying ambiguous positions between market categories and art genres. This is an important and enlightening correction to my dualism, and one which I am inclined to follow both theoretically, in my thinking about forms such as comics, which I regard as crucial interstices in the structure of media, and in my own creative projects. In particular I want to acknowledge the importance of Cayley’s conception of digital artworks as “instruments,” an approach from which I have learned much in trying to evolve more interesting examples of cybertext.</p>
<p>Gromala reminds me that my schismatic refusal of immersion could prove as shortsighted as the narrative teleology for which I task Janet Murray. Citing her own art work (again, practice makes the difference), Gromala points out that immersive techniques can be used to call attention to the conditions of a virtual world, to invite attention to its limits and liminalities. She worries that my arguments for resistant and disruptive practices imply a rejection of virtual reality, not simply in its hypothetical commercial instantiation as the holodeck, but even in more experimental guises. As she says, my position can easily be taken to pernicious extremes that deny the importance of embodiment or fetishistically defend alphabetic abstraction. One has only to consider a text like Neal Stephenson’s <span class="booktitle">In the Beginning Was the Command Line</span> to appreciate this warning.</p>
<p>In my defense I can only suggest that process and implementation will ultimately count more than polemics and theory. We do not yet know in material, social terms how work in configurative media can best contribute to molecular culture and the reformation of the social bond. The present essay represents only a bare start; plentiful questions remain. Should we begin our work and thinking with existing game genres? Should we limit game experience to individual players, or rather concern ourselves mainly with constructive and multiplayer forms? What set of social expectations should succeed the old canons of print literacy, and how should we structure educational practice accordingly? The answers to these questions will require much more subtle exploration than I have offered here, not to mention pragmatic compromises; but perhaps this essay represents one of many possible beginnings.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/gamespecific">back to Ludology introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/john-cayley">john cayley</a>, <a href="/tags/diane-gromala">diane gromala</a>, <a href="/tags/neal-stephenson">neal stephenson</a>, <a href="/tags/beginning-was-command-line">in the beginning was the command line</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/cybernetics">cybernetics</a>, <a href="/tags/pragmatism">pragmatism</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator962 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comStuart Moulthrop's responsehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/insurgent
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stuart Moulthrop</div>
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</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-05-21</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/vigilant">Genre Trouble</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As a member of what Tom Brokaw might call the Least Generation - the first cohort of postwar American males who legally escaped draft registration - I grew up without military experience. Nonetheless I have seen enough war movies to understand rank-and-file grumbling, in which the infantry assess the wisdom of their commanding general, usually while His Nibs sits incognito on the next rock (<span class="dramatitle">Henry V</span> IV.i). Such dissent is not to be confused with disloyalty. It dissipates quickly enough when the company is called unto the breach. Meanwhile, however, your private soldier will loudly debate the finer points of campaign strategy, as I do here in my capacity as foreign volunteer in Espen Aarseth’s northern insurgency.</p>
<p>Make no mistake, I strongly support the main aim of the uprising, which is to create a distinct space within cultural analysis for games and other “configurative” practices, in Markku Eskelinen’s phrase. I join Aarseth and Janet Murray (who made a similar observation years ago) in believing we must “recognize simulation and the need to simulate as a major new hermeneutic discourse mode, coinciding with the rise of computer technology, and with roots in games and playing.” I am also persuaded, like Aarseth and unlike Murray, that we can best understand simulation and interface poetics by discarding “narrativism” and the curious misconception that storytelling is somehow the most important cultural activity.</p>
<p>A secession of this sort demands many virtues in which Aarseth happily excels: originality, critical intelligence, perversity, and above all, irreverence. “We don’t know much about technology, or biology, but we do know stories and storytelling,” he writes, telling a tale very much out of school. “So why be critical when we can be important instead?” There is a wonderful, naked-emperor-outing cynicism in this jibe, an audacious move against humanism’s unacknowledged strategies of self-promotion. At the same time one may also detect a touch of critical reflection, at least if one is a certain sort of lapsed narratologist (like Aarseth) or misbegotten fiction writer (like me). The ironic “we” implies reciprocity, and with it a sense of history. Though now we assume the mantle of wisdom, we may have played our own imperial nude scenes in the past.</p>
<p>If truth is the first casualty of conflict, however, self-criticism usually stands next in the line of fire, even when well-shielded by irony. Certain of Aarseth’s positions (no doubt like my own) seem implicated in a power game no less partial and limiting than that of traditional narratology. If the new Scandinavian game theory means to offer a fresh approach to information culture - a task which Aarseth and company certainly can perform - these blind spots need pointing out.</p>
<p>With a rigor perhaps born of militancy, Aarseth insists that games “are self-contained,” insulated from any intertextuality. “Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a whole new meaning,” he writes, “the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined unambivalently by the rules.” Seeking to exclude narrativist contraband, Aarseth embargoes all cultural implications. We are not to understand the game of chess as an allegory of feudalism or <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> as misogynist-masochist fantasy. By his reasoning, chess would be the same game even if the pieces were replaced with bottle caps and called minks, warts, and chevrolets instead of bishops, knights, and pawns. Likewise, Aarseth claims, the pneumatic Lara Croft could be traded for a less salacious anatomy, leaving the game intact. In each case the player’s engagement with the rule system - the “gaming situation” - matters far more than incidental details of the “gameworld.”</p>
<p>If these claims seem indisputable at face value it is only because they are alarmingly narrow. <span class="lightEmphasis">Mink takes chevrolet</span> may contain no reference to chivalric hierarchy but it does assert a logic of territorial domination and unequal privilege. No doubt one can play the game without connecting this logic to European history, but such an approach reduces chess to a series of abstract transactions, which may work well enough for mathematics but seems far too narrow for any serious cultural critique. <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span> shows even more clearly this artificial restriction of focus. Certainly one could swap Lara Croft for a digitized Rowan Atkinson without technically changing the feedback loop between player and program. It seems unlikely, though, that <span class="booktitle">Mr. Bean: Tomb Raider</span> would sell nearly as well to its primary audience. Lara Croft’s physique may consist of raw data but it cannot be treated as such for critical purposes. While one may look past or through the avatar body during play, the significance of games as cultural forms goes beyond the player’s time in the loop.</p>
<p>This of course Aarseth and his some of his colleagues would strongly deny (though see Eskelinen for a more nuanced view). At least in the present, early work, Scandinavian game studies seem to insist on closing the “hermeneutic circle of simulation” against any discourse not linked to a very narrow construction of play. This strategy does shake off the covering cherub of narrative, a defensive maneuver that seems very necessary; but at the same time it threatens to impose a hazardous solipsism.</p>
<p>Aarseth declares at one point that “games focus on self-mastery and exploration of the external world, not exploration of interpersonal relationships (except for multiplayer games).” The dangers of this doctrine are apparent. If we understand information games as purely self-interested interactions, we will have a hard time living up to Aarseth’s laudable thesis that simulation is “a major new hermeneutic discourse mode”; at the least, we will find it difficult to explain how that mode can contribute to social experience. It also seems telling that Aarseth addresses multiplayer games in a parenthetical afterthought. Arguably the most promising forms of information play involve a shared encounter with complex systems - of the sort not found in first-person shooting galleries, even when multiple players are involved, but rather in MUDs and MOOs. If game studies close themselves off from this form of simulation, they will fall notably short of their promise. Aarseth says at one point that “unlike literature, games are not about the Other, they are about the Self.” Whether or not this statement holds for games (I have my doubts), we should make sure that it does not apply to game studies.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/lawful">Chris Crawford responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/algorithmic">Espen Aarseth responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/henry-v">henry v</a>, <a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/markku-eskelinen">Markku Eskelinen</a>, <a href="/tags/janet-murray">janet murray</a>, <a href="/tags/narratology">narratology</a>, <a href="/tags/scandanavia">scandanavia</a>, <a href="/tags/games">games</a>, <a href="/tags/gaming">gaming</a>, <a href="/tags/game-studies">game studies</a>, <a href="/tags/tomb-raider">tomb raider</a>, <a href="/tags/lara-croft">lara croft</a>, <a href="/tags/mud">MUD</a>, <a href="/tags/moo">MOO</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator951 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com